Review: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

OK, you have to start with the title here.

Even if you aren’t a poetry person, you have to be struck by it. It sounds as if it’s making sense even though it can’t be true at any literal level; you can’t have more than one assassin, but the grammar coheres. Then, in that verbal ambiguity, new possibilities arise: “assassin” is metaphorical, and “my” refers not just to one person but to many occupying the same position.

The book turns out to be an interrogation of those possibilities while also probing the nature of “sonnets.” It’s angry, thoughtful, committed to a project of self-betterment, and full of images and turns of phrase that do remarkable things, things like the title of the book which also serves (in the singular) as the title for each of the separate 50-or-so poems here.

I think there are a handful of these that work less well – a few are too gimmicky for my taste (“You don’t seem to want it” or “I cut myself on some glass”) and some seem a little too repetitive of the motifs that Hayes weaves throughout (like the “male hysteria” conceit”) – but even those tend to be redeemed by the cumulative power of the project. Many more are flat-out excellent while most of the “ordinary” ones are also effective and compelling. The result is that even those rare misfires function as part of a collection. In fact, I come eventually to wonder if they aren’t ultimately impressive as well, kind of like the squawks in a Coltrane solo – not so much errors as reminders of the technical brilliance it takes to pull off jazz at that level.

This is very much a jazz collection. The purist in me protested when I first realized these “sonnets” are neither metrical nor rhymed. I got over that complaint about 12 lines into the first one, though. Hayes has intuited the rhythm of the sonnet and then seen how far he can stretch it.

Here’s one example from my expanding list of great poems here:

Sometimes the father almost sees looking
At the son, how handsome he’d be if half
His own face was made of the woman he loved.
He almost sees in his boy’s face, an openness
Like a wound before it scars, who he was
Long before his name was lost, the trail
To his future on earth long before he arrived.
To be dead and alive at the same time.
A son finds his father handsome because
The son can almost see how he might
Become superb as the scar above a wound.
And because the son can see who he was
Long before he had a name, the trace of
His future on earth long before he arrived.

I’m struck by how that really is sonnet-like, not just in its layout but in its laying out of contrast. The first eight lines give us what I think is a gorgeous reflection on a father seeing a son and loving him for being shaped by the woman he loves, and then the final six reverse that, looking from the son to the father.

That’s enough to make me say wow, but Hayes is full of other excellent ones. Consider these lines from “From now on I will do my laundry early Sunday: “I believe/ Eurydice is actually the poet, not Orpheus. Her muse/ Has his back to her with his ear bent to his own heart./ As if what you learn making love to yourself matters/ More than what you learn when loving someone else.”

Or consider from “Our sermon today…”, “When the wound/ Is deep, the healing is heroic. Suffering and/ Ascendance require the same work. Our sermon/ Today sets the beauty of sin against the purity of dirt.” As with the book’s title, I am both bewildered by such language and drawn to it, drawn by its clarity of expression to find the ambiguity beneath it.

Or from “The subject is allowed…”, “What if it were possible to make a noise so lovely/ People would pay to hear it continuously for a century/ Or so. Unbelievably, Miles Davis and John Coltrane/ Standing within inches of each other didn’t explode.”

Or the first one, the one that convinced me to buy this and that points so forcefully to the nature of ambiguity at the center of the collection, “Orpheus was alone when he invented writing./ His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent/ His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it./ He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant/ I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.”

I’ve said all of that without touching on the political. I’ve heard this one referred to as one of the first great literary works to grapple with what the Trump moment means. That’s true in part since many of these address not just African-American history but also, implicitly, the Afro-pessimism that’s taking root in so much contemporary literature. One poem even seems to mention Trump by name – the not-as-effective-as-my-favorites “I pour a pinch of serious poison” – but I think, in the end, our current moment is incidental.

This is really what jazz has always been: an improvisation that insist a single moment can make sense of everything we imagine of both “before this moment” and “after.” This is angry and beautiful, and it speaks to poets and poems who’ve helped shape its voice, but it’s ultimately something like Coltrane at his best. It’s an artist spilling it all out and finding, against all odds, that it holds together.


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