A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award
In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.
BIO
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.
REVIEWS
"Reading Terrance Hayes' thick, gorgeous, knowing, endlessly surprising poems is like spending a long evening with your most soulful and garrulous friend, one you haven't seen in ages. His poems are protean; you never know when they will shape-shift or turn a corner. Hayes and his poems are brilliant, which is to say, bedazzling but also filled with illuminating light that shows us things we hadn't seen before." --Elizabeth Alexander
"Hayes's work fits strong emotions into virtuoso forms. . .He is a poet of swallowed garrulity, imagined riposte, mock correction, and interior litigation. . .[his] poems are like a Pixar version of the mental marionette show, a dazzling space crammed with comic jabs." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
"Another stunner, a collection that sees the poet thinking more deeply about perception - the public and private, the viewed and the ignored. . .the work hurdles between violent beauty and stark, philosophical truth telling." --Publishers Weekly
Penguin Books / March 31, 2015
0.4" H x 8.7" L x 5.9" W (0.3 lbs) 112 pages