To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight

(Paperback)

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Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air. NPR

In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself. Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poets search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America.

The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories.
There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I cant really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache.

Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

Reviews

"National Book Awardwinning poet Hayes plunges into creative nonfiction with this book about another poet, Etheridge Knight, cautioning readers that 'this is not a biography.' Throughout, Hayes challenges genre constraints, bringing together personal reflections, drawings, and poems by Knight and himself, and constructing a work that is part speculative biography, part autobiography, and part critical essay. . . . 'How does someone become a poet In this wonderfully lyrical text, Hayes suggests it isn't in the details of an individual's life, but through a hard-to-trace yet vital network of influences."
Publishers Weekly

"There are no heroes to be found here but there are plenty of poets. Theres also an abundance of evidence regarding what makes a poet a poet. Not surprisingly the best instances transcend far beyond anything possibly offered in a classroom setting. Hayes has written a book in its best parts about the larger realm of living... and, for the most part, he does so with the self-scrutiny necessary to bring those lessons to bear on his own work. For there is no work without the life which both informs and is informed by it."
Patrick James Dunagan,Entropy

"Poets are people who promise to continue responding to what is actual. The poet's first poems comprise the promise. As time passes, one admires the continuation as much as the poems. This is why a young poet may be inspired simply by watching his mentor put on her coat and walk out the classroom door: she is in motion, heading towards the world of her materials, as she vowed to do years ago. The motion is the influence, the air stirred in the space between teacher and ephebe . . . In To Float In The Space Between, Terrance Hayes serves up a creative meditation on Influence.
On the Seawall

"Partly, this is a critical biography of the black poet Etheridge knight: how he came to be the poet and man he was, who did he influence and who was he influenced by. But its also a critical biography of Hayes himself. . . .In looking at Hayes looking at Knight, we see both figures, and the history of black poetics, more clearly."
Anthony Domestico,Commonweal

"To Float in the Space Betweenis simply amazing. Its an investigation of Hayess family tree, a time-lapse of one poets bloom, and an homage to the seed(s) that started it all."
Cody Lee,NewPages

"As is the case throughout Hayess work, To Float in the Space Betweenis a meditation on family; from the first, Hayes has fingered the grain of black families, whether linked by blood or duty or sexual tension or aesthetic kinship. To Float movingly bridges these concerns. . . . The 19 sections in Hayess book take their titles and focus from phrases in Knights most celebrated poem, 'The Idea of Ancestry.' Thus this collection offers a deeptextural(as opposed to textual) encounter between two important and mercurial minds."
Ed Pavlic,The New York Times

Author Bio

Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry, Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry, and three other award-winning poetry collections. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.