Lighthead: Poems

(Paperback)

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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 presenta-tion 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.

Reviews

Hayess work is terrific . . . its grounded in narrative even as its linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old. The New York Times

Lighthead displays a riffing, wildly relentless insistence and astonishing brio . . . Hayes breaks down categories and builds up forms with acrobatic glee. Megan ORourke, The Years Best Poetry, npr.org.

Author Bio

Terrance Hayes is the author ofLighthead,winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books areWind In a Box, Hip Logic, andMuscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship.How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.