Terrance Hayes

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Tennessee

Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead "Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

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B. Fairchild

J. Allyn Rosser

Steve Scafidi

Natalie Shapero

Julie Sheehan

Enid Shomer

Martha Silano

Gary Soto

Gerald Stern

Angelo Verga

Paul Violi

Beth Fennelly

Charles Harper Webb

Susan Wood

Franz Wright

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Ray A. Young Bear

Matthew Zapruder

Bill Zavatsky

Allen Ginsberg

Louise Gluck

Albert Goldbarth

Robert Hass

Tony Hoagland

Andrew Hudgins

T. R. Hummer

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Caroline Knox

Yusef Komunyakaa

David Lehman

Thomas Lux

William Matthews

Kevin McFadden

Campbell McGrath

Heather McHugh

Peter Meinke

David Bottoms

Phyllis Moore

Harryette Mullen

Lucia Perillo

Michael Ryan

Tim Seibles

Alan Shapiro

Charles. Simic

Maura Stanton

James Tate

Robert Wrigley

Estate of Lucille Clifton

Dean Young

Kevin Young

Kim Addonizio

Ginger Andrews

Nin Andrews

John. Ashbery

Dorothy Barresi

Erin Belieu

Josh Bell

Charles Bernstein

Wanda Coleman

John Berryman

George Bilgere

Richard Blanco

Adrian Blevins

Daniel Borzutsky

Catherine Bowman

Jason Bredle

Geoffrey Brock

Christopher Bursk

Richard Cecil

Michael Collier

Maxine Chernoff

Marilyn Chin

David Clewell

Judith Ortiz Cofer

Billy Collins

Gregory Corso

Justin Courter

Jim Daniels

Gregory Djanikian

Denise Duhamel

Carl Dennis

Martín Espada

Stephen Fellner

Richard García

David Graham

Paul Guest

R. S. Gwynn

James Allen Hall

Mark Halliday

Jeffrey Harrison

Bob Hicok

Stephen Dobyns

Richard Howard

David Huerta

Bruce A. Jacobs

Rodney Jones

James Kimbrell

Galway Kinnell

Jennifer L. Knox

Poems about Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else

Can serious poetry be funny? Chaucer and Shakespeare would say yes, and so do the authors of these 187 poems that address timeless concerns but that also include comic elements.

Beginning with the Beats and the New York School and continuing with both marquee-name poets and newcomers, Seriously Funny ranges from poems that are capsized by their own tomfoolery to those that glow with quiet wit to ones in which a laugh erupts in the midst of terrible darkness.

Most of the selections were made in the editors' battered compact car, otherwise known as the Seriously Funny Mobile Unit. During the two years in which Barbara Hamby and David Kirby made their choices, they'd set out with a couple of boxes of books in the back seat, and whoever wasn't driving read to the other. When they found that a poem made both of them think but laugh as well, they earmarked it.

Readers will find a true generosity in these poems, an eagerness to share ideas and emotions and also to entertain. The singer Ali Farka Touré said that honey is never good when it's only in one mouth, and the editors of Seriously Funny hope its readers find much to share with others.

Seriously Funny

Elizabeth Alexander

Alvin Aubert

Gerald Barrax

Remica Bingham

Cyrus Cassells

Toi Derricotte

Rita Dove

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Cornelius Eady

Thomas Sayers Ellis

Joanne Gabbin

Nikki Giovanni

Kendra Yvette Hamilton

Sean Hill

Langston Hughes

Jackson

Douglas Kearney

Mark McMorris

E. Miller

Kamilah Aisha Moon

Indigo Moor

Lenard Moore

Thylias Moss

Gregory Pardlo

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Carl Phillips

Stephanie Pruitt

Claudia Rankine

Evie Shockley

Patricia Smith

Jean Toomer

Natasha Trethewey

Alice Walker

Frank X. Walker

Margaret Walker

Afaa Weaver

Al Young

Kwame Alexander

Tara Betts

Arna Bontemps

Shane Book

Gwendolyn Brooks

Sterling A. Brown

Melvin Dixon

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson

James A. Emanuel

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Ross Gay

C. S. Giscombe

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Myronn Hardy

Michael S. Harper

Janice N. Harrington

Robert Hayden

George Moses Horton

Ravi Howard

Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Helene Johnson

James Weldon Johnson

Patricia Spears Jones

June Jordan

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Audre. Lorde

Shara McCallum

George Marion McClellan

Claude McKay

Marilyn Nelson

G. E. Patterson

Ishmael Reed

Ed Roberson

Mona Lisa Saloy

Reginald Shepherd

Anne Spencer

Amber Flora Thomas

Melvin B. Tolson

Askia M. Touré

Wendy S. Walters

Anthony Walton

Phillis Wheatley

Albery Whitman

Sherley Anne Williams

Richard Wright

Toni Wynn

Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

This book presents the natural world seen through the eyes of black poets. ""Black Nature"" is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry - anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers, such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as newer talents, such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. ""Black Nature"" brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

Black Nature

Alaska

Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry

From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison's aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.

Watch Your Language

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Poems (National Book Award Winner)

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018 In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Lighthead

Terrance Hayes

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

B. Fairchild

Seriously Funny

Elizabeth Alexander

Black Nature

Terrance Hayes

Watch Your Language

Terrance Hayes

Lighthead

James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody: the Essential James Tate

Simon Shieh

Master

Terrance Hayes

Hip Logic

Mieko Kawakami

Astra Magazine, Ecstasy

Terrance Hayes

How to Be Drawn

Terrance Hayes

To Float in the Space Between

Terrance Hayes

So to Speak

Lytton Smith

All Purpose Magical Tent

Terrance Hayes

Wind in a Box

Browse by categories

Terrance Hayes

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

B. Fairchild

Seriously Funny

Elizabeth Alexander

Black Nature

Terrance Hayes

Watch Your Language

Terrance Hayes

Lighthead

James Tate

Hell, I Love Everybody: the Essential James Tate

Simon Shieh

Master

Terrance Hayes

Hip Logic

Mieko Kawakami

Astra Magazine, Ecstasy

Terrance Hayes

How to Be Drawn

Terrance Hayes

To Float in the Space Between

Terrance Hayes

So to Speak

Lytton Smith

All Purpose Magical Tent

Terrance Hayes

Wind in a Box