I have loved sonnets ever since I first read Shakespeare’s sonnets in high school. Although I haven’t always understood how varied and diverse sonnets can be, I have been fascinated by the form, the styles, and the ways in which poets have utilized sonnets in the modern world. In my second to last semester of graduate school, I was given a few of the sonnets from this book to read as a way of emphasizing how poetic forms can be modulated and modified to suit creative expression. I was enthralled with the few of the sonnets I was given and immediately went and bought this book to read.

This book is one I know I will read again. Terrance Hayes is an absolute master of a writer, but there was something about this book that jarred me in ways that I found unsettling. It reminded me of the first time I read Ta-Nehesi Coates’ book Between the World And Me; it was a book full of something I knew would forever change me. I read Coates’ book in my first term at Marylhurst University, and the book completely undid what I thought about race and racism up to that point. That’s why I say it unsettled me; it unsettled me in my privilege, in my ignorance, in my fragility. It pointed to all the ways my silence had been complicit in the systematic oppression of Black people. It revealed to me that while my ignorance was not my fault, it was my responsibility to fix.

I feel like this book of poetry from Hayes continued that unsettling process. Because, as a white person, there is a simple truth I must always remember: being better than I was yesterday is a good first/next step, but it is not the final destination and never should be. It’s so easy to become apathetic, even self-righteous in my now less ignorant existence. I’ve marched in rallies and protests. I’ve confronted white supremacy in my life, in my family, in my friends. I’ve read and educated myself, and all of these things are good to do, but they are and will be meaningless if I don’t continue to digest them, if I don’t continue to confront my privilege.

Hayes says it best in one of his own sonnets: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison / part panic closet” (11). “I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat / grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone” (11). “It is not enough / to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed” (pg 11). These sonnets, addressed to a past and future assassin of the speaker, implicate America, patriotism, imperialism, and capitalism in the systemic functions of racism, white supremacy, poverty, etc.

This book is a raw wound bleeding onto a battlefield already stained with too much Black blood. The speaker acts as both historian and prophet, calling to attention the already unspeakable and horrendous acts committed to Black people and communities that continue to be committed and ignored, justified, explained away. “I damn you/ with the opposite of prayer” (12). These sonnets, prophetic and imbued with anger, a sense of injustice, pull no punches. “I thought we might sing / of the wire wound round the wound of feeling” (61). The sonnets grieve for the past, acknowledge the present, and then point towards the potential future.

But there is also hope here. The speaker allows for the possibility of change, the possibility of better, while also not blurring the lines of who needs to initiate that change. And as I read this book, I felt the hope was a generous offering to me, to my existence in this world. An offering I didn’t deserve, but one I hoped I would be worthy of. White America has done little to nothing for Black people and other people of color, and has actively oppressed and resisted change, resisted accountability, resisted ownership of the many atrocities committed. We, collective white America, do not deserve the generous offering of hope.

But the speaker in Hayes’ book offers it to us anyway. It’s up to us to accept it.