Elisa Gabbert Reviews Books by Terrance Hayes and A.E. Stallings

The New York Review of Books features a review by Elisa Gabbert of two recent books with sonnets as a common thread: A.E. Stallings's Like (FSG, 2018) and Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets, 2018). An excerpt from her thinking:

Hayes borrows the concept of the American sonnet from the influential California poet Wanda Coleman, who supplies the book’s epigraph (“bring me/to where/my blood runs”). Coleman, who died in 2013, published most of her books with the independent, avant-garde-leaning Black Sparrow Press, dealt with racism and poverty explicitly in her work, and took a “jazz” approach to traditional form with sonnets that involved, in her words, “progression, improvisation, mimicry.” In an interview with Paul E. Nelson, quoted on Hayes’s acknowledgments page, she said, “I decided to have fun.” And they are fun—“a mystic gone ballistic, not home but blood/on the range” she writes in “American Sonnets: 91.” Hayes too seems to be having fun, treating the writing, almost like Stallings, as a kind of play, although his subject matter is frequently devastating.

If Stallings’s combination of cultural influences is American and classical Greek, Hayes’s could be the poetics of whiteness and of blackness, which arrive in conflict in the lines that open the book...

Read the full piece at NYRB.