Like a coin toss that keeps coming up heads, iterated titles suggest an occult lucky streak bound to break. For this latest collection, he made one big choice at the outset: all the sonnets share the same title, “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.” This repetition is superstitious, a tribute paid to the imagined assassin, as if the poems can buy back time in fourteen-line reprieves. In his five books, he has perfected a sort of poem where wild jams carom inside arbitrary formal boundaries. Hayes, who is forty-six, won the 2010 National Book Award and is a professor at N.Y.U. He freelances inside a form he calls “part music box, part meat grinder,” fashioning a diary of survival during a period when black men are in constant danger. A former college basketball star, he treats poetry like a timed game, a theatre for dramatic last-minute outcomes. The day after the 2016 Presidential election, Terrance Hayes wrote the first of the seventy sonnets collected in his new book, “ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.” Time had been altered in some baleful and uncertain way the sonnet offered an alternative unit of measurement, at once ancient, its basic features unchanged for centuries, and urgent, its fourteen lines passing at a brutal clip.
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