Starred review from July 24, 2023
Across three various and virtuosic sections, Hayes (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) examines the personal and public, from fatherhood to the murder of George Floyd, in his muscular and meditative seventh collection. With a masterful eye for image and description—“A wolf hungers because it cannot feel the good/ In its body. The people clap & gather round/ With fangs & smiles. The father lifts the son/ To his shoulders so the boy’s harmonics hover/ Over varieties of affections, varieties of bodies/ With their backs to a firmament burning & opening”—Hayes’s writing unfolds musically and dynamically. Many lines have an aphoristic intensity (“A god who claims to be on the side of good// but remains hidden is strange as the rules of grammar”), providing moments of sharp clarity within longer narratives. The collection’s “American Sonnets” are richly allusive, engaging with “the tree of liberty,” Octavia Butler, and Nelson Mandela: “He’d say, ‘Excuse me,’ kind/ Even at two years old, then resume his supernatural story-/ Telling. Folks far & wide would go home laughing & crying.” Hayes reinvents received forms, from the “Do-it-Yourself Sestina” to “A Ghazzalled Sentence After ‘My People... Hold On,’ by Eddie Kendricks, and the Negro Act of 1740.” These original, ruminative poems showcase one of the most rightly acclaimed poets writing today.
