The age of the overwhelming

Pain and poignancy collide in 70 sonnets

We live in an age of the overwhelming: social media, societal schisms and activism, Charlottesville, North Korea, and Donald Trump, just to name a few.

We also live, still, in an age of pertinent and existential questions cracking away at what overwhelms us. In his sixth book, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” Terrance Hayes, the poetry editor for The New York Times Sunday Magazine and 2014 MacArthur Fellow, forces us to face the fury of such questions.

Pain and poignancy collide in this collection of 70 sonnets — all of them bearing the book’s title — spread across five sections of 14 sonnets each, a meta nod to the awareness and introspection the book aims to deliver. And deliver it does. Over the course of these poems, Mr. Hayes, a former professor of poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, persuasively asks what room a “MAGA” world leaves for Blackness, for fatherhood, for freedom, and for the self.

The title of the book, and in turn the title of each poem, begs these questions outright. There’s an inescapability to this title, a specter set over the sonnets — who is the assassin? What is in the speaker’s past and future that suggest assassination? What does the gesture of sonnets for this assassin imply about the speaker?

Perhaps one possible answer is a familiar menace. “Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk / Of musk, muster & deliberation crawling over reasons / And possessions I have & have not touched?” a poem early on asks with a (not so)-subtle finger pointed to the president. It pulls no punches when it says, “… I pray for a black boy / Who lifts you to a flame with bedeviled tweezers / Until mercy rises & disappears.” What America once was, and what it threatens to be again perhaps, is an early candidate for Mr. Hayes’ assassin. This foe, however, is often deftly dodged through the book’s form of choice.

For me, the sonnet is an old and storied, if not somewhat dry, form, but in Mr. Hayes’ hands it finds new agency, particularly in how the Volta becomes like a quantum particle between any given 14 lines. “Probably all our encounters are existential / Jambalaya” a later poem states, the conditional syntax both something of a barrier and an entrance to deeper perspective; “… After blackness was invented / People began seeing ghosts.” Here, Mr. Hayes delights in taking the ordinary and cracking it open ever so slightly to reveal to us something beyond ordinary, as the poem concludes: “Something happens everywhere in this country / Every day. Someone is praying, someone is prey. / Probably blindness has a chewed heart / In its belly, or a gate opening upon another gate.” When the turns of the poem can come along any point of these sonnets, or even as its bookends, we realize they’re a sort of past and future in their own rights.

As much as the intensity of the book points outward, it finds space to anticipate the assassin in what I find to be a surprising place: the self. Midway through, a poem ponders “To be dead & 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.” A past, a future, and an in-betweenness are all at work in these musings. “He almost sees in his boy’s face, an openness / Like a wound before it scars.” This pondering carries over in later poems unambiguously concerned with family: “You have a gun but to use the poison / You have your son dip a rose in venom / …You have a gun but to use the dagger / You decide your daughter should dangle / It beneath her dress.” The work in this poem reverberates with urgency, with questioning, with preoccupations of (dis)connection.

Through these poems, readers find themselves caught squarely in the unbeatable peril of the speaker, at once chased by a past America rearing up old ugliness and by a future that appears more mirror than canvas — a cracking mirror, at that. There is a danger threatened from all around, and even from within.

And what is more overwhelming than the consideration of a past and future assassin? All across “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” there are familiar, threatening visages greeting the speaker. The provocative title implies a deadness on both ends of the present moment for its speaker, and the singular use of “assassin” implies the same cause of death on either end; yet in the middle is a vibrancy of poems unafraid to peer into the personal, the political, the familial, the niche and the everyday.

In “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” this urgency is expressed through the finely honed wit, lyricism, and poetic prowess of Terrance Hayes. We see this at the end of the collection, where an index of the sonnets finds itself in the form of a Cento, five ending sonnets composed of all the first lines of first 70 — a beautiful collapsing of the book’s message and heart.

And perhaps the takeaway of Mr. Hayes’ work here is that what lies in between is heart — a pounding of poems that stays in the chest long after the pages are set down. These poems stay with me, they linger, they poke and ask questions, and this is the book’s success. What more can one ask from poetry?