Lighthead

by Terrance Hayes

Overview

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry

Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143116967
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	404,463
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

The deservedly acclaimed Hayes returns in his fourth book with the kinds of sly, twisting, hip, jazzy poems his fans have come to expect, but also with a new somberness of tone and mature caution. “You can spend your whole life/ doing no more than preparing for life and thinking/ 'Is this all there is?' ” warns the book's opening poem. Later, in a book that thinks hard about fatherhood, family, and mortality, Hayes asks, “Who cannot think// Our elegies are endless endlessly and the words/ We put to them too often unheard and hurried?” Elsewhere, Hayes treats memory with his signature wit: “I believe, as the elephant must,/ that everything is punctured by the tusks of Nostalgia.” The book also contains a surprisingly effective series of poems based on a form called “pecha kucha,” which, Hayes explains, is a type of Japanese business presentation in which the presenter must riff on a series of slides or images; Hayes adapts this form by bracketing the title or “slide” he's riffing on (“The Magic of Magic” and “The Function of Fiction” are two examples) and following with a four- or five-line stanza. The poems free-associate through their triggers, but images and themes satisfyingly resurface. Hayes, now entering mid-career, remains one of our best poets. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Hayes’s work is terrific . . . it’s grounded in narrative even as it’s linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old.” – The New York Times
 
“Lighthead displays a riffing, wildly relentless insistence and astonishing brio . . . Hayes breaks down categories and builds up forms with acrobatic glee.”  – Megan O’Rourke, The Year’s Best Poetry, npr.org.

From the Publisher

In this thoroughly delightful collection, Hayes invites readers to share his experience and especially his sense of the African American experience through the eyes of such alter egos as Lighthead, Bullethead, Tankhead, and Orpheus. "I already know the difference/ between hearing and listening," one narrator says, and if they are paying attention, readers will, too, in poems that acquire their power through humor and music, the rhythm of a line, the cadence of a song whether that song be a sonnet or a litany of "Twenty-six Imaginary T-shirts" or an homage to the likes of Marvin Gaye or Gwendolyn Brooks. In Hayes's two Golden Shovel poems, he ends his own lines with Brooks's words. Further evidence of Hayes's innovation can be seen in three Pecha Kucha (pe-chak-cha) poems, a take on the Japanese phrase for chitchat and a kind of business presentation. Hayes delivers his narratives in 20 short stanzas, each a short take on a subject. "How, with pipes of winter/ lining his cognition, does someone learn/ to bring a sentence to its knees?" Terrance Hayes does. VERDICT Highly recommended for contemporary collections.—Karla Huston, Appleton Art Ctr., WI

Library Journal

…playful, edgy…
—The Washington Post

Elizabeth Lund

Hayes's fourth book puts invincibly restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions: a son's frustration, a husband's love, a citizen's righteous anger and a friend's erotic jealousy animate these technically astute, even puzzlelike, lines.
—The New York Times

Stephen Burt