You assassinate my lovely legs and the muscular hook of my cock. Which is like the head of a turtle wearing my skull for a shell. You assassinate the smell of my breath, which is like In bushels of knotted roots, flowers and thorns until our body The bones managing the body’s business are cloaked You assassinate the sound of our bullshit & blissfulness.
The tender bells of my nigga testicles are gone. The deep well of my nigga throat is assassinated. The earth of my nigga eyes are assassinated. Here is some of Hayes’s biting testimony, from the thirteenth in the sequence: The culture in which these “American Sonnets” exist could itself be the assassin. One of the abiding images in this collection of nearly eighty sonnets (all of which share the collection’s title) is that of the black body, so often consumed, caricatured, and recycled by the American artistic and literary idiom it’s helped to create. The last question might be easiest to answer. The title of Terrance Hayes’s new book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, provokes a series of questions: Sonnets? Why? What makes them American? Past and future, but not present? How? And most pressingly, who is out to kill beloved poet Terrance Hayes?
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