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.

Starred review from June 1, 2023
It's difficult to say whether any single element stands out more than others in this polyphonic, multivalent collection of poetry by Hayes (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, 2018), winner of the National Book Award. Hayes' role as an oracle of the auricular remains remarkable, as when he transforms the vocalic acoustics of a chorus of frogs into an unsettling commentary on sundown towns: "tree frogs for sale in a Deep South flea market / Just before the last blood of dusk." The poet's nimble knowledge of music and visual arts is notable, as in an evocative nod to 1970s funky soul: "Stevie Wonder's head purples with plural visions / Of blackness, gavels, grapples, purrs, pens." Throughout, Hayes continues to stretch the limits of language and explore the far regions of English, while his formal experimentation shines as in instructions for a "DIY Sestina" and a ghazal that presses form and reference to the Negro Act of 1740 in such saturated lines as "the kind of people who come / after people pursuing freedom for their people // while pursing freedom for the people / who come after their people." For Hayes' literary commentary, see Watch Your Language (p.15). May this poet's brilliance always shine.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 1, 2023

Across his career, Hayes has proven himself to be the rare poet capable of imbuing pronounced introspection into poems of grander historical, cultural, and philosophical incident with easy elegance. Following American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, easily the author's most political work to date, Hayes's latest returns to a more self-reflective space. That's not to say Hayes is pulling punches--the poem "George Floyd" opens: "You can be a bother who dyes/ his hair Dennis Rodman blue/ in the face of the man kneeling in blue"--but the collection is animated by its variations. Hayes has always been a poet whose work feels unlimited in what it can contain, and here there are talking cats and dogs, Bob Ross and Lil Wayne, and magic goat's milk. But there's also an apparent melancholic vein that weaves through and around the playfulness of form and content, a clear-eyed reckoning with the weight and weariness of existence that powers the collection. Hayes recalls the "morning song" of pill bottles, laments that a scar can be "so old others must tell you how it was made, observes that "starting out we have no wounds to speak of / beyond the ways out parents expressed their love," and wonders, "If you see life's potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?" Read this collection on repeat. VERDICT Quietly devastating and exquisitely wrought, these poems are among the very finest of Hayes's career.--Luke Gorham

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.