Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
(Paperback)
Publishing Details
Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
By (Author) Terrance Hayes
Penguin Putnam Inc
Plume
29th August 2023
18th July 2023
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Biography and non-fiction prose
811.509
Physical Properties
Paperback
240
Width 152mm, Height 228mm
Description
From the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African-American poets star in Terrance Hayes' 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' astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.
Author Bio
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other poetry collections are American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music, and he is also the author of To Float in the Space Between- A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Hayes lives in New York City, where he is a professor of creative writing at New York University.
