So to Speak

by Terrance Hayes

Overview

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead—to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language

The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143137726
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other poetry collections are American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music, and he is also the author of To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hayes lives in New York City, where he is a professor of creative writing at NYU.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/24/2023

Across three various and virtuosic sections, Hayes (American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) examines the personal and public, from fatherhood to the murder of George Floyd, in his muscular and meditative seventh collection. With a masterful eye for image and description—“A wolf hungers because it cannot feel the good/ In its body. The people clap & gather round/ With fangs & smiles. The father lifts the son/ To his shoulders so the boy’s harmonics hover/ Over varieties of affections, varieties of bodies/ With their backs to a firmament burning & opening”—Hayes’s writing unfolds musically and dynamically. Many lines have an aphoristic intensity (“A god who claims to be on the side of good// but remains hidden is strange as the rules of grammar”), providing moments of sharp clarity within longer narratives. The collection’s “American Sonnets” are richly allusive, engaging with “the tree of liberty,” Octavia Butler, and Nelson Mandela: “He’d say, ‘Excuse me,’ kind/ Even at two years old, then resume his supernatural story-/ Telling. Folks far & wide would go home laughing & crying.” Hayes reinvents received forms, from the “Do-it-Yourself Sestina” to “A Ghazzalled Sentence After ‘My People... Hold On,’ by Eddie Kendricks, and the Negro Act of 1740.” These original, ruminative poems showcase one of the most rightly acclaimed poets writing today. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for So to Speak:

“These are pieces that fuse trauma and humor, erudition and silliness in ways that somehow preserve those disparate qualities.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“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.” —The Guardian

“[Terrance Hayes] is a virtuoso, fully confident in his ability to bend established rules like the many African-American icons, from Prince to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Octavia Butler, he invokes in the poems of this extraordinary book.” —Robert Archambeau, The Hudson Review

“Hayes’ poems never fail to play, thrillingly, with the constraints of form, and they engage with culture, past and present, while remaining deeply rooted in the personal. Don’t miss this one.” —Lit Hub

“[A] polyphonic, multivalent collection of poetry . . . Hayes' role as an oracle of the auricular remains remarkable . . . The poet's nimble knowledge of music and visual arts is notable . . . Throughout, Hayes continues to stretch the limits of language and explore the far regions of English, while his formal experimentation shines . . . May this poet's brilliance always shine.” —Booklist (starred review) 

“Across three various and virtuosic sections, Hayes examines the personal and public, from fatherhood to the murder of George Floyd, in his muscular and meditative seventh collection. With a masterful eye for image and description . . . Hayes’s writing unfolds musically and dynamically . . . These original, ruminative poems showcase one of the most rightly acclaimed poets writing today.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This book is truly innovative on an aesthetic level and on a political level. Hayes is one of the few poets who has figured out how to fuse politics with lyricism in ways that are both clever and impactful. And more importantly, the book does not compromise emotional depth, but rather, embraces it, which makes the politicized moments all the more insightful.... So to Speak is worth picking up and reading more than once." —Andrea Syzdek

“Like the great composers and musicians—like Thelonious and Miles, like Bach—Hayes is ever witty and elegant. His concerns are unexpected and yet right on time. His verse is so close to music, you’ll wonder if you’re reading words or notes. Solemnly elegiac and brokenheartedly playful, So to Speak is poetry of pure genius.” —Toi Derricotte

“Hayes’ new work is as vital and energetic as ever, but there’s also a new tone in many places here—penitent, self-inculpatory. These are the poems of a certain age: scars so old others must tell you how they are made. Hayes’ invention allows his poetry to house almost anything: from the political to the sensual, from a magic goat to a talking cat. He is a singular poet, and this book a singular achievement.” —Nick Laird

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2023

Across his career, Hayes has proven himself to be the rare poet capable of imbuing pronounced introspection into poems of grander historical, cultural, and philosophical incident with easy elegance. Following American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, easily the author's most political work to date, Hayes's latest returns to a more self-reflective space. That's not to say Hayes is pulling punches—the poem "George Floyd" opens: "You can be a bother who dyes/ his hair Dennis Rodman blue/ in the face of the man kneeling in blue"—but the collection is animated by its variations. Hayes has always been a poet whose work feels unlimited in what it can contain, and here there are talking cats and dogs, Bob Ross and Lil Wayne, and magic goat's milk. But there's also an apparent melancholic vein that weaves through and around the playfulness of form and content, a clear-eyed reckoning with the weight and weariness of existence that powers the collection. Hayes recalls the "morning song" of pill bottles, laments that a scar can be "so old others must tell you how it was made, observes that "starting out we have no wounds to speak of / beyond the ways out parents expressed their love," and wonders, "If you see life's potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?" Read this collection on repeat. VERDICT Quietly devastating and exquisitely wrought, these poems are among the very finest of Hayes's career.—Luke Gorham

Library Journal

Terrance Hayes is a fine poet and a fine reader of his poetry--and this audiobook offers a lovely experience of both. Some of the poems here, particularly the "American sonnets," a formal variation of Hayes's invention, need a little more help than he can give in terms of identifying the structure of lines and stanzas, so those studying the works may want to have the printed text handy for reference. Still, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in just listening to the author read as he explores his experiences as a Black man, a father, a son, a student, and an American in the time of President Trump. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile