So to Speak

by Terrance Hayes

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead —to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language

The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices.

Genres: Poetry, Race, African American

112 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2023

About the author

Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, and Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reviews

[Luke Gorham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Want to reread the second half. For now, 3½. Could change.

**Update: Reread. This is a strong 4½ . Guess I was too wine-soaked on my first read to fully engage.

The heart, biologically speaking, is ugly as it pumps
its passion & fear down the veins. Which is to say,
starting out we have no wounds to speak of
beyond the ways our parents expressed their love.

[Lucy Hodgman · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorites: ars poetica with bacon, how to fold, both of the octavia butler sonnets

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

this guy gets me every time :’)

[S꩜phie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diy sestinas go so hard

[Theodore · Rating 4 out of 5]

So to Speak feels like Hayes is loosening, even further, the formal muscles he's always had, but now with a different kind of play and vulnerability.

[Ambra Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having spent many years reading and rereading Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, this collection is as equally lyrical, elegant, and bends sound in ways that continue to memorize. Along with sonnets, there are sestinas and a canto. Sestinas will always be one of my favorite forms and I love seeing them in any book of poetry. The DIY sestina mechanism he uses is mind boggling, a feat, and one I cannot wait to attempt myself. He includes instructions in the notes with how to operate the mechanism. The inventiveness is astounding. The mention of Icarus and Orpheus reckon back to American Sonnets in new and unfamiliar ways. I'll have to listen to and reread the collection to unravel its masterful web.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Solace, survival, multiple genres of longing.// I remember how seeing a white woman walking alone/ A few steps ahead of me late one night spooked me// So much I slowed and cast a harmless warble/ Into evening. Sometimes even at a distance,// I know what unsettles this country can also unsettle me./ Sometimes fear tells us exactly where we are heading." This sad, empowering, reflective and structurally innovative new collection from Terrance Hayes provides invaluable commentary on the American reality.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrance Hayes is just so very wicked smart. I love that you can see that in his poems AND YET they are still, for the most part, decipherable. I've been reading and rereading this collection all month and every time i get through it, I've turned down five or six more corners. It's basically the whole book at this point. There's so much precision social commentary while also having so many moments that seem quite personal. It's just so good.

[Melblue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always just in awe of Hayes style of putting words on the page and into my hands

[Lianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nobody does poetry the way Terrance Hayes does. Holy shit, he stuns and inspires me.

[joy彡]

hmmm kay! i think im not smart enough for these

[Jason Rosenstock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creative, thought-provoking, clear. Best poet writing right now.

[Sam Albala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Artists / historians / linage / links / paint you / watch / mouth / swallowed / lil Wayne / Bob Ross / Toni Morrison / parenthood / paths traced

[Reagan Kapasi · Rating 2 out of 5]

For you when want a varied look at the black, American experience with many references to pop culture icons

[Carlos Orellana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not for me.

[Renee Morales · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4

i had some trouble with this collection at first just because i didn't connect to hayes riffing on himself as much as i did some of his other poems. "watch your mouth" was somewhat meh to me and didn't pick up momentum until the next section. that being said when the poems picked up they really picked up.

quoting some of my favorites right now...

"You are not you for long. / I am not trying to change the world, / I am trying to change myself / so that the world will seem changed."

"Nature does not destroy, / Only change... Tell me what you pray when you are broken or break."

won't quote an excerpt bc i just love so much of "How to Fold" that I suggest just reading it. Like that poem is soooo tender y'all please mind me jumping from stanza to stanza in these quotations but: "When you find your phantom lover's item in the pile, you will have to decide how to handle it... When it is an undergarment, you may grasp the heat which does not linger in silk or lace... You cannot live without the heat and iron of love..." this is prob my favorite one of the entire book like how personal this idea of yearning for your lover through the warmth of their clothes produced by their own body heat and trying to replicate that kind of sensation through an iron or dryer or another artificial means of reproducing like ugh but then the smell is off because what you're looking for is the scent of the person you love not detergent not neutrality and i'm saying all of this now (literally rambling) to emphasize that the space my brain's at now makes it so the kind of intimacy hayes writes about in this become translates so loud and revelatory and necessary to me like please promise me you'll read this poem if you don't read any others.

i overall enjoyed the collection but having read american sonnets and lighthead b4 i wouldn't consider it like a hayes CLASSIC but it's still amazing like come on its terrance hayes

also subtle flex that i got to hear him perform "Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait" last year at NYU and his genius filled the auditorium like he is god in his own right.

TLDR read the book if you got 1.5 hours of free time :)

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This new book from Terrance Hayes is full of wisdom, formal innovation, and crackling tight whiplash language in just about every poem. This collection contains the Do it Yourself Sestina templates that caused such a splash when they came out in Poetry.
It is full of the type of insights we have come to expect from Hayes, for example, this one from Taffetta
You are not you for long. / I am not trying to change the world, /I am trying to change myself / so that the world will seem changed.
I think I learned most from the way this volume uses threads of sound and repeated phrases to tie together almost every poem in the volume. Here is an example of this magic from Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm
Each new pair of glasses assures things / never look the same, but several glasses / of liquor can create the same feeling. / Balance the morass & the molasses of jackasses.

The volume also contains a few of the American Sonnets we fell in love with from Hayes’s previous volume. I’ve included my favorite as an example.
The companion book Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry is also out now!

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five-star fabulous! “Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait” is a work of consummate genius. The “Two Do-It-Yourself Sestina Starters” in the Notes are a fabulous introduction to the form as a “lyrical, potentially alchemical energy.” As Hayes notes, “the DIY Sestina works like a linguistic slot machine of multiple teleutons rotating on the gears of your input.” Sort of like learning how to paint your self-portrait with Bob Ross.

Favorite Poems:
“Pseudacris Crucifer”
“DIY Sestina: What Does This Remind You Of?”
“Envoy of William H. Johnson’s ‘Nude’”
“Taffeta”
“Ars Poetica with Bacon”
“American Sonnet for Fire and Lightning”
“Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm”
“Things Seen Right and Left Without Glasses”
“The Kafka Virus Verses: Thursday”
“American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin”
“How to Fold”
“Canto for Ghosts”
“Blood Pressure Medicine”
“Another Great Ravager of the Crops Was the Boll Weevil”
“The Underworld Marvin Gaye Walking Tour”
“Bob Ross Paints Hour Portrait”
“DIT Sestina: What Would You Ask the Artist”

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

American Sonnet for the New Year

Things got terribly ugly incredibly quickly
Things got ugly embarrassingly quickly
actually Things got ugly unbelievably quickly
honestly Things got ugly seemingly infrequently
initially Things got ugly ironically usually
awfully carefully Things got ugly unsuccessfully
occasionally Things got ugly mostly painstakingly
quietly seemingly Things got ugly beautifully
infrequently Things got ugly sadly especially
frequently unfortunately Things got ugly
increasingly obviously Things got ugly suddenly
embarrassingly forcefully Things got really ugly
regularly truly quickly Things got really incredibly
ugly Things will get less ugly inevitably hopefully.

[Ashley T · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 An incredible poetry collection. One snippet from the poem “Taffeta”:

“I loved the feel of cloth folding around
my movement. That dress still hangs somewhere
waiting to be worn, its sheen & she-ness
shameless & sweat-stained. There’s a yearbook
photo to prove I wore it but it’s true
a photograph, especially when it’s an image
of flesh, grows, over time, more & more
strange. You are not you for long.
I am not trying to change the world,
I am trying to change myself
so that the world will seem changed.”

This is just a little sample of a collection that is inventive and reflective. I would very much recommend it!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

the brand new terrance & hey i'm. a big fan I like it more than Lighthead ... lovely to see TH get warm with the sestina, that chunky menace. & treating it more or less as it was devised in medieval France, an algorithmic plug-in-and-play. George Floyd poem excellent. bob ross too? holy moly. you get the feeling midway thru a midway Terrance poem where you're wondering yr reaction if it was anybody else that'd written it,? magnum magnum

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m very glad I read this collection of poems. The author always challenges me (in the best ways) to see the magic he is delivering in and through his poems. I’m grateful for each of them and for the insight, they offer to me about our nation, my soul, the wit and discernment around me in surprising places.

[Khepre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very introspective and retrospective collection of poetry that eloquently uses personification at times and allegories and visuals to highlight an excellent connection of poems that not only highlight living in America but living within itself. And how living within yourself highlights and perceive your worldview.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrance reading "Bob Ross Paints Your Portrait" at Brooklyn Poets opened up a whole new portal to awe. (Including a Bob Ross documentary.) I love so much how Terrance experiments and plays hard. I didn't love every poem here but I don't even care. I want to be around this much smart no matter what.

[Kaya Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

“i am not trying to change the world, i am trying to change myself so that the world will seem changed”

“if you see suffering's potential as art, is it art or suffering?
If you see life's potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?”

honorable mentions to:
“do not put your head under your arm”
“illustrated octavi butler do it yourself sestina “

[Michelle McGrane · Rating 5 out of 5]

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗦𝗘𝗔𝗟𝗘𝗬 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗟𝗟𝗘𝗡𝗚𝗘 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯

𝗗𝗔𝗬 𝗧𝗪𝗢

Terrance Hayes’ latest collection is astonishing. These powerful, dazzling poems were published last month together with his latest work of literary criticism, 𝘞𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘓𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦. Special love for ‘Watch Your Mouth: Pseudacris Crucifer’, ‘The Prince of Cleveland’, ‘Homage to Gertrude Badu’, ‘Taffeta’, ‘Bob Ross Paints Your Picture’ and ‘What Would You Ask the Arts?’. 𝘚𝘰 𝘵𝘰 𝘚𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬 is a must read.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hayes is always worth reading, but, while there were poems that spoke to me, this volume wouldn't be my recommendation on where to start. Still thinking about the DIY Sestinas that play a central rol in holding the book together.

[Ellen Mays · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up? I find it difficult to rate books of poetry, I’m figuring my system out. I enjoyed his playfulness with words and even provides “machines” to encourage your own poetry. But his subject is (harsh) reality in racial and social concerns. From Columbia SC!

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Seated alone at the edge of the bed,
grasp the finest fabric first,
the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch
among laundry high & hot enough
to wreathe your body in rags & towels
and undivided multicolor trappings."

[Cook Memorial Public Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 2023 Staff Nonfiction Favorite Pick by Hannah! For readers of The Glass Constellation by Arthur Sze and Above Ground by Clint Smith.

Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...