So to Speak
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Summary
A dazzling new collection of poems from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
In So to Speak, the dazzling new collection by Terrance Hayes, the poet seeks to understand how we see ourselves now. He draws the reader into fabulous fables, American sonnets and do-it-yourself sestinas as he roves among the predicaments of the present and recent past, piecing together a new map of our times.
Here, a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds. Talking cats tell jokes in the Jim Crow South. Green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and elegies for David Berman and George Floyd unfold amid the global pandemic. Here, too, Hayes contemplates fatherhood, history and longing, in urgent, personal poems of a remarkable openness and humanity.
Masterful, contemplative and massively alive, So to Speak shows one of contemporary poetry's great innovators at his muscular best. It is a treasure-trove of exploration, and an invitation to each of us to engage in the creativity that makes and remakes our world. It is, above all, the mature, restless work of a leading poetic voice.
Reviews
Hayes is a maestro of poetic forms and these poems sing with a musical dexterity that embraces vulnerability and ambiguity . . . So to Speak reads like an ambitious mixed-media project questioning the role of art in representing suffering . . . Soul-searching questions ripple through a series of electrifying American Sonnets about James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia E Butler, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, reimagining the works and voices of many black cultural icons.
Guardian
