Next week—on July 25th—Penguin will release Terrance Hayes’s Watch Your Language. The book is series of fantastic essays about the last century of American poetry. Including graphs, artwork, multiple choice quizzes, tarot cards, a boardgame, Hayes’s own poems for context, and biography framed by epistolatory gestures, Watch Your Language is a hybrid wonder. From personal experiences to poetry scholarship, Hayes makes timelines of poetry history and influence. Festooned in the book are biographies of poets (many Black), some iconic and some completely new to me, introduced by birth year as they would be in an encyclopedia. Of particular interest is his work on Gwendolyn Brooks and Wanda Coleman and their influence on him and poets of Hayes’s generation. Observations from his boyhood in South Carolina to a poetry conference in Shanghai right before Trump was elected (and Hayes would soon begin his American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin) to Cave Canem workshops, Hayes takes us on a journey of what it is like to be a Black American poet now. Embedded through the book are a series of 255 questions, such as “What if every day you ask questions of yourself in poetry?” and “Did you know Ezra Pound met Emmett Till’s father in prison?” and “Is Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens the whitest poet in the canon?” Watch Your Language is inventive, thought-provoking, and pure joy.
Congratulations, Terrance!
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Author: Denise Duhamel
