![]() ![]() Each poem addresses the Assassin directly, casting the reader as an intimate, at times complicit witness to the persistent, daily disgrace of racism in America, or as the Assassins confronting our victim, who understands our rage with a capacity we cannot match. These challenges go on within the broader context of American racism, an inescapable atmosphere through which the speaker moves with acute awareness. In Hayes’s work, Black lives revolve around recognizable human struggles: family relationships, masculine identity, autonomy, and accountability. In the sonnet beginning “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous,” Hayes intertwines themes of American public violence and cultural failure with private relationships and experiences. Hayes divided the poems into five sections of 14 sonnets each the book's first line index thus creates five more complete sonnets composed of the first lines of each sonnet in each of the five sections. ![]() The 70 collected in this volume all bear the same title, “Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” and the last line of each sonnet links to the next by becoming its first line. ![]() ![]() Hayes composed over 70 American sonnets during the first 200 days of US President Donald Trump's term of office. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |