Terrance Hayes

Mar 3, 2025 | williamspivey.substack.com | Langston Hughes |Amanda Gorman |Terrance Hayes |Jaamal May

Poetry cleanses the palate; it exists independently or as part of a greater narrative. Here are nine magnificent poems, and one I wrote means something to me. None would survive a review by Ron DeSantis, that, and one. “The Hill We Climb,” recently made news by being banned in a Florida elementary school. Enjoy while you can!BY MAYA ANGELOUYou may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you?

Jan 8, 2024 | thebaffler.com | Matt Sandler |Terrance Hayes |Esmat Elhalaby

One day in the fall of 2021, I received a voicemail message at work. The caller announced, “This is Cecil Brown from Stanford University.” I knew the name—we had met at an academic conference a decade earlier, where we spoke about his 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy, but we hadn’t kept in touch. This time, Brown was calling about something else.

Jul 31, 2023 | poetryfoundation.org | Daisy Fried |Joshua Bennett |Terrance Hayes

“We talkin’ about practice.” —Allen Iverson As I read Watch Your Language (Penguin, 2023) and So To Speak (Penguin, 2023), Terrance Hayes’s new books, I found myself thinking about freedom. Both books frame creativity as a lifelong practice that can lead to a kind of liberation. Hayes recalls his time playing basketball as a teen and then in college to reverse the usual hierarchy between practice versus the game.

Jul 5, 2023 | washingreview.com | Terrance Hayes |Steve Larkin

Jun 28, 2023 | scribd.com | Nick Ripatrazone |Terrance Hayes

JulySo to Speak by Terrance HayesWhether in free verse or in sonnets, Hayes builds energy in his poems through recursive language and inversion of phrases. This method is quite successful, imbuing a dually playful and disarming sense to his work. “Ladies & Gentleman put your hands together / for ’s beautifully iambic name,” he begins a poem early in the collection. “Do not think of all the tall in him / squeezing into a stall at the mall as strange.