Terrance Hayes discusses the heat in poetry, and writing that takes us past our boundaries. His new book, seventy sonnets written in the first two hundred days of Trump's presidency, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, flies out of the cages of literary, cultural, and historical forms. Poetry, being supreme, takes in the many sides of every issue: black, white; tolerant, racist; right, wrong. Warning: Today's episode contains strong language that some listeners may find offensive.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin book
American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin halts the reader in the unsustainability of our contemporary social moment. It counts the bodies of the past in order to stop the accretion of future ghosts. The crux of the book comes at its closing:
Terrance Hayes, recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, the National Book Award, and a litany of other prizes, is one of the most gifted poets working in our language. His new book, a short volume of sonnets, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, is a gift in a fraught moment. These sonnets, existential, political, personal, retain a moral ferocity and urgency that propels that entire cycle forward.
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie?
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché's visionary work has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Her first new collection in 17 years, In the Lateness of the World is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death.
In 70 poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Since 1993, the Penguin Poets series has been committed to publishing a broad range of contemporary poetic voices, in elegant and affordable editions, with the belief that poetry is an essential force that enriches the larger culture and can both comfort us and challenge us to read and think in new ways. We champion formal innovation, diverse voices and perspectives, technical grace, and emotional heft. Collections in the series address a wide array of topics, from race, gender, migration, social justice, and cultural inheritance to science, nature, and climate change; from domestic life and family bonds to spirituality and popular culture; from the real to the imagined; from the past to the infinite possibilities of the future. This has been our mission for over 25 years, and we hope that you will join us in reading, exploring, and celebrating the ever-expanding world of Penguin Poets. 2ff7e9595c
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