You can see this when he addresses his subject and admits, “Assassin, you are a mystery / To me” he writes, “I say to my reflection sometimes. That makes Hayes’ capaciousness remarkable for example, he says, “we may be alike, Assassin, you & me: we believe / We want what’s best for humanity.” Imagining and declaring a bond between threat and threatened humanizes the whole dynamic, making these issues workable. This threat is one mothers teach their children to be alert to. Sometimes, this is white America (the “white boys who grew into assassins”) or some aspect of the threat inherent in our culture, which is never abstract and no longer subtle (if it ever was for those subject to it). In jazzy, meandering poems, Hayes invokes his Assassin.
These features fulfill what he says, “The song must be cultural, confessional, clear / But not obvious.” He goes on to delineate other rules of the game-compassion, “a record of witness & daydream”-but most essentially, the music is “Where the heart is torn or feathered & tarred, / Where death is undone, time diminished.” And this is what Terrance Hayes has done. The individual poems don’t rhyme, but there’s plenty of mouth-music they don’t have a classic box-clicking resolution of a traditional sonnet but Hayes makes sure that the music does resolve. Hayes has created 5 sonnet crowns, or sequences of 14 sonnets, but the table of contents lists one entry, so it’s all one song, only rougher. Hayes seems to be arguing with himself, declaring, “I carry a flag bearing a different / Nation on each side.” Even the poem about the despised leader acknowledges that this sentiment is exactly what “the racists said when the president / Was black.” One sonnet (they all have the same title as the book) starts, “Goddamn, so this is what it means to have a leader / You despise…” And yet, because “home is the mess laid bare,” these are not editorials, but poems. Trumpet” and the grabbing of p-sy and so many more that the book rings as timely as any. His politics are active, with references to “Mr. Fusing the personal and the political, Hayes is one of our world’s true unacknowledged legislators. These jazzy takes on Wanda Colman’s American Sonnets, who Hayes quotes by way of explanation in his Acknowledgements, fulfill her criteria with gender-shifting voicings, socially engaged “shadings of attitude,” a rich musical and literary playlist, and enough structure to make the form feel familiar but enough improv to stay dialed in. Hayes has set the bar very high for himself, having won the National Book Award, NEA and Guggenheim grants, the Whiting Award, and the MacArthur Fellowship, to name just a few he’s earned with his six previous collections. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is Terrance Hayes’ best book, and that’s saying a lot.
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