Terrance Hayes’s seventh book of poems, So to Speak (Penguin Books, 2023) is an excellent collection in terms of how the poet has developed since the release of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin in 2018—a definitive collection of sonnets. In this book, Hayes includes a handful of American Sonnets, a couple of DIY sestinas, and voice-driven poems that have a refined lyrical quality to them. What makes So to Speak such a brilliant read is the depth of emotionality that threads all throughout the collection on both a personal and aesthetic level. Hayes has mastered emotion in this collection in the sense that he has been able to fuse personal experience, voice, and form to create poems that contain sincerity, passion, and wisdom in ways that are very human and insightful. He continues the thread of politics and race with playfulness and poignancy. Some of the poems included were written during the COVID pandemic, and overall, the collection features poetic experiences that feel both rooted in true-to-life moments, but at the same time, are also imaginative and surreal. This review will take a brief look at a few poems in the collection that demonstrate Hayes’s refined voice, lyrical brilliance, and playfulness.

“Pseudacris Crucifer” is the opening poem of the first section which is called Watch Your Mouth. The poem was written for his son and it’s written in Hayes’s signature meandering style that braids lyric and narrative and personal perspective. In the poem, he makes use of a few images: tree frogs, a flea market, and a boy playing a harmonica. These images are deepened by the voice of the speaker, who is telling a story about a father who takes his son and daughter to a flea market in the Deep South where they discover a pail of tree frogs for sale. The father tells the daughter, “A tree frog is called a tree frog because it chirps / Like a bird in a tree….” He gives more information about tree frogs:

A single tree frog can sound like a sleigh bell,
The father says. Several can sound like a choir
Of crickets. Once in high school as I dissected
A frog, the frog opened its eyes to judge
Its deconstruction, its disassembly,
My scooping & poking at its soul,
And the little girl’s eyes go wide as a tree frog’s eyes.

The father brings in different types of knowledge to describe the nature of tree frogs: poetic knowledge, personal knowledge, and scientific knowledge. Although he is speaking to his children, the speaker of the poem seems to be addressing a reader, and so, the father is also unknowingly speaking to an audience of readers, which creates an interesting kind of tension within the poem. He continues:

Some call it “the spring peeper.” In Latin
It’s called Pseudacris crucifer. False locusts,
Toads with falsettos, their chimes issuing below
The low leaves & petals.

As the father talks about the tree frogs, his son is playing a harmonica, which adds another layer of texture to the poem, helping to make it more sensory. And as the boy plays the harmonica, the father’s description of the tree frog becomes more illuminating:

Some tree frog species spend most every day underground.
They don’t know what sunlight does at dusk.
They are nocturnal insectivores. No bigger than
A green thumb, they are the first frogs to call
In the spring. They may sound like crickets
Only because they eat so many crickets.
Tree frogs mostly sound like birds.
The tree frog overcomes its fear of birds by singing.
The harmonica playing is so bewitching,
The boy gathers a crowd in a flea market
In the Deep South. A bird may eat a tree frog.
A fox may eat the bird. A wolf may eat the fox.
And the wolf, then, may carry varieties of music
And cunning in its belly as it roams the countryside.
A wolf hungers because it cannot feel the good
In its body.

The father’s description of the tree frog not only becomes primarily poetic, it becomes situated in the larger ecosystem of nature that includes birds, insects, and predators like foxes and wolves. In a sense, the father complicates the nature of tree frogs by discussing them in relation to other animals, who essentially have to eat each other to survive. As the boy plays the harmonica, and a crowd gathers, the father lifts his son: “so the boy’s harmonics hover / Over a variety of affections, varieties of bodies / With their backs to a firmament burning & opening.” However, the most compelling moment of the poem comes just near the end:

You can find damn near anything in a flea market:
Pets, weapons, flags, farm-fresh as well as farm-spoiled
Fruits & vegetables, varieties of old wardrobes,
A rusty old tin box with old postcards & old photos
Of lynchings dusted in the rust of the box.

The speaker does not emphasize the lynchings, but rather, elaborates on the rust, which he describes as being “as brown as the father / And the boy on his shoulders & the girl making / The sound a tree frog makes in a flea market / In the Deep South….” This is the most compelling moment of the poem not just because the speaker uses the word lynchings, but because the speaker situates the word within the ecosystem of a culture that once upheld racial violence, but now, at the moment of the poem, that culture is able to gather around Blackness (the son playing the harmonica) in a way that is much more peaceful, and life-affirming, but still dangerous. That history of violence is still there, but it is situated in a flea market in the Deep South in the contemporary moment. Additionally, the cultural ecosystem that was influenced by racism and violence is a much different ecosystem than the one the tree frogs inhabit, which is influenced by survival. “Pseudacris Crucifer” is a poem that masterfully contains many aesthetic textures and meanings: the way tree frogs are described, the way the father interacts with his children, the boy’s harmonica playing, the environment of a flea market in the Deep South, the concept of survival in nature, the history of racial violence, and how people gather around the boy just to listen to his harmonica playing. It’s safe to say that this is one of the most compelling poems Hayes has ever written; the maturity, beauty, and complexity of it helps to set the tone for the rest of the book.

“The Prince of Cleveland” appears a few poems later and it’s written in a similar meandering style as the previously discussed poem, but it employs an “I.” Here, the speaker has set out to write a poem that would encourage people to visit Cleveland, but humorously points out, “…I don’t think I will be able to do so / until I am actually sitting in Cleveland / writing about the view from my hotel / window in a part of the city the city intends / to gentrify.” Alongside the humor is a critical perspective about gentrification, which helps to set the stage for the poem. This poem also employs a few key images: Cleveland, an office building, a homeless man who sings “Purple Rain,” and Prince. In this poem, homelessness and gentrification are strongly linked:

The bricks of the empty
newly constructed office building
have been replaced with less historical bricks.
They have just about finished the work,
the men who painted the bricks a colonial
white & have left fluorescent lights buzzing
all night on the floors to discourage
squatters like the brother I see on the street
outside the building belted in what is either
a black leather jacket or black plastic trash bag
belting “Purple Rain” poorly, but earnestly.

After the political implications of the poem have been made clear, the speaker not only interacts with the homeless man, the homeless man reminds him of his uncle. Much like with “Pseudacris Crucifer,” personal experience plays a role in the poem, but here, it’s more magnified. The uncle was also the person who introduced the speaker to Prince:

Outside, the voice of the Prince of Cleveland
is high as fire. I can tell he smokes.
He favors my uncle around the eyes.
Would you like to know your future? he asks
When I find myself smoking next to him.
He has made a lucrative fortune-telling
business with little more than a lawn chair,
a card table & playing cards. I decline.
One of the doors of the office building
is unlocked. Drop cloths, buckets,
trash bags. One of those old boom boxes
you never see anymore. My uncle used
to have one. It was in his bedroom
I first saw a Prince record, though I didn’t know
it was Prince at the time. I thought it was
a mustached & hairy woman on a horse.

Again, the last few lines of this section employ a bit of humor, which helps to lighten the poem, but there is a lot going on under the surface in terms of politics and personal experience: the political disease of neoliberalism in the form of gentrification and the thin line that exists between the speaker, the homeless man, the uncle, and Prince. In a certain sense, they all seem to blend together, and suddenly, the poem is less about Cleveland, and more about how race, wealth, and homelessness reinforce each other in a societal system that is designed to maintain those distinctions. Although the speaker is visiting Cleveland, he seems close to the homeless man, who reminds of him of his uncle, so that they become linked on a personal level, but what is compelling about the poem is that as the speaker stands next to the homeless man, it becomes apparent that he could easily be the homeless man himself. The distinctions fade. Through gentrification, neoliberalism seeks to distinguish in a particular area between what is desirable and undesirable and to erase, or remove what is undesirable—racialized poverty. But as the homeless man’s presence suggests, gentrification doesn’t always succeed. The homeless man exists anyway, and he makes his living singing Prince songs for “tourists seeking the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame / where they will find a mural of Prince / but no Prince made of wax” or telling fortunes. This poem is cleverly complex; the speaker never explicitly does what he set out to do in the first few lines: “…it is time to complete the poem / presenting reasons to visit Cleveland.” Although he does complete the poem, he never gives clear reasons of why anyone should visit the city, but he does paint a clear picture of what’s wrong with not only Cleveland, but every major city in America: neoliberalism expressed through gentrification, which seeks to hide “undesirables” but instead, as in the case of the homeless man, makes them more visible.

 “An Extended Public Service Announcement” opens the second section of the book which is called Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus. This poem makes use of the ballad form and the speaker both humorously and seriously plays with the subjects of religion, slavery, history, and lyricism. The poem is advertising “end-of-the-year Watch Night services.” Here are the third and fourth stanzas:

You may find yourself in a room somewhere
In the near past or distant future awaiting Lincoln’s
Decree. Upon the proclamation, two contests
Of resistance may ensue like two troubled storms

Making a violent path to the sea. You may dress
Like a worshipper in the bowels of a warship
Made of money & forest parts. You may
Quench your thirst with the rain on your lashes.

The speaker is playing with a particular kind of history here and the images are incredibly raw and poignant: You may dress / Like a worshipper in the bowels of a warship / Made of money & forest parts. You may / Quench your thirst with the rain of your lashes.” This poem features the connections between slavery, so-called emancipation from slavery, and religion. Here are the next three stanzas:

You may dress like a woman who scours
The schoolhouse until it is clean enough for church.
The room may have been built according
To the architecture of farmers & teachers

Dressed as slaves. (After several hours working
For the nothings of enslavers black people
Raised the scaffolding of holy shelters in the dark.)
Someone may have slaughtered and prepared the cow

That provided the hide for the preacher’s Bible.
Someone may have smuggled raw cotton from the field
And later worked it until it was useful cloth.
The cross may be made of a blacksmith’s scraps,

The poem gets more specific as it continues to address a “you” who is now a woman “who scours / The schoolhouse until it is clean enough for church.” Identity becomes more blurred as the farmers and teachers are “dressed as slaves.” But also, the speaker points to a cycle wherein a slaughtered animal becomes a preacher’s Bible and stolen cotton from a field becomes cloth and the cross is made from what a blacksmith couldn’t use. These images are not only signifiers of slavery and race, but of a system, made up of definitive objects, that reinforced it on an economic and personal level: it took the physical labor of actual people to kill the animal to make the bible, to steal the cotton in order to turn it into cloth, to make use of the blacksmith’s scraps to construct a cross. A few stanzas later, the speaker makes an interesting proclamation: “If you feel like a tourist / in a war-torn country, come figure it out with us.” This statement intensifies the political situation of the country in such a way that goes beyond the history of slavery and racial oppression. It becomes all-encompassing. Following that line, the poem becomes more playful as it depicts the names of churches:

Area churches welcome you to service. Mother
Emanuel, New Horizons, Macedonia, Bridge of Life,

Heaven’s Door, visitors, welcomed to churches featuring
Street names & whereabouts, the names of saints,
Apostles, angels, kings & servants, names featuring
Charity, Restoration, Faith. First African is not far

From Second African, the Chapel of Redemption is between
The House of Conviction & the Temple of Forgiveness,
There’s a great organist at the Shepherd’s Tabernacle,
The Eighth Avenue Church of Eve’s Destiny is across the street

From the Eighth Avenue Church of Adam’s Redemption.
One-hundred-year-old twins sing at the Olive Branch
House of Holiness in Christ. The list of services
Is not exhaustive. Cancellation never happens.

Aside from the playfulness, there is a serious undertone that is suggestive of a deeper truth: religion has played a major role in the history of Black oppression. It has served as a source of comfort and empowerment, but it has also been limiting and restricting in the sense that it was the only refuge Black people had in order to feel visible and human and worthy. And because the speaker has cleverly opened up the poem to anyone who feels oppressed, that experience of only having religion to turn to becomes magnified in the poem. If you are oppressed and want to feel like you’re doing something about it, your only option is to go to church. That’s the only option that was available to Black people, and as the speaker points out in an earlier stanza: “You may hear tales of the hour the state upgraded / Black folk from property to slightly more free.” So, even when Black people were emancipated, religion remained the only go-to source for human and soul affirmation. The masterfulness in this poem lies in the speaker’s clever rhetorical moves: to address a “you” that could be anyone, and to open up the lens of Black oppression so that it can be experienced and understood on a more visceral level.

So to Speak is a truly masterful book of poems; Hayes has refined his voice and his poems have become that much stronger and that much more compelling as a result. His lyrical moves are brilliant; his interactions with form is impressive. This book is truly innovative on an aesthetic level and on a political level. Hayes is one of the few poets who has figured out how to fuse politics with lyricism in ways that are both clever and impactful. And more importantly, the book does not compromise emotional depth, but rather, embraces it, which makes the politicized moments all the more insightful. It is recommended that those who have not read Hayes’s previous book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin should read it alongside So to Speak because in many ways it does feel like a continuation of that book in terms of style, voice, and content. Reading American Sonnets would help readers have a deeper, more satisfying reading experience in regards to this collection. But even still, So to Speak is worth picking up and reading more than once. It is a strong book of poems and it will be interesting to see where Hayes goes next in his poetic journey.

February 12, 2024