How to Be Drawn (Terrance Hayes)

After I got about halfway through this book of poems, I bought two of Terrance Hayes’ books (including one that I had previously read during a sonnet-craze a few years back, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin) and put a hold on the rest at the library, so there will be more Terrance to come in this space.

Some unusual forms poems take in this book:

• A logic problem.

• Five lines in response to each chapter of an 1871 book on the “Right Development of the Moral and Mental Capacities [..] of the Juvenile Mind.”

• A crime report.

• Instructions for a Seance with Vladmirs

• Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh

…but much of the book is traditional free verse that occasionally laps into something that is a type of form, including frequent repetition of words like:

Othello. (Was Othello a Negro?) Don’t you lie

about who you are sometimes and then realize

the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother

Bastard, like the king who wanders his kingdom

searching for the king. And that’s okay.

No one will tell you you are king.

No one really wants a king anyway.

There’s something also about the line breaks, the momentum and movement of them that speaks to me, and I want to learn from. More on that perhaps when I finish the next book.

Rating: 📢📢📢📢📢📢