terrance hayes american sonnets analysis

“Light as a featherweight monarch, viceroy, goldfish.” “Are you not the color of this country’s current threat advisory, and the pom-poms of a school whose mascot is a clementine?” Hayes read. Hayes said explicitly that most of the sonnets were written in response to his thoughts regarding a Trump presidency, and he said one sonnet was printed on orange paper – to emulate the color of the president’s skin. The result? A collection of more than 30 sonnets titled “American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassins ”. The day after President Trump won the election, critically acclaimed poet and educator Terrance Hayes immediately began writing. Kaela Thut reported on the reading as follows: I love that the student journalists of the University of Michigan were some of the first of us to have the opportunity to reflect on Hayes’s new series after he featured the new work in his February 14 reading at the U of M, occasioning two pieces in The Michigan Daily that contextualize the project.

I’m sure I’m not the only one feeling this excitement as Terrance Hayes’s new “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” series appears in one literary magazine after another in quick succession this year – one as the April 25th Poem-a-Day selection for the Academy of American Poets site, twelve in the July/August issue of The American Poetry Review, five at Literary Hub on July 19, one in the July 31st issue of The New Yorker, four in the September issue of Poetry, one in the Fall 2017 issue of Tin House (reprinted at ). There is a particular excitement in experiencing a favorite poet’s new project unfurl, if not in real time as its poems are written, then soon after, before a collection binds them together and they enter the world surely and conclusively as one book.

Terrance hayes american sonnets analysis