Terrance Hayes

"A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams...

"These wondrous poems are lyric germinations of the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Terrance Hayes shapes language into figures of music and music into figures of language"--

The fourth collection by the author portrays the light-headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. It sets what it means to be "light longing for lightness" against what it means to "burn with all the humanity fire strips away." Hayes navigates melancholy, irreverence, and the sublime.--From publisher description.

"Wanda Coleman-"the unofficial poet laureate of L.A."-passed away in 2013, but her influence casts a long shadow across contemporary American poetry, including Terrance Hayes' American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. In this first new collection of Coleman's work since her death, Hayes has selected more than 130 poems originally written and published between the late 1970s and early 2000s"--

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, completed a series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration, the mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915-16. Within months of its making, the Migration Series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even-numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd-numbered panels). The work has since become a landmark...