So I'm the fool who didn't realize that Terrance Hayes, a famous poet who won the National Book Award, is Black. Honest I didn't. I don't "follow" contemporary poetry so much as I consume vast quantities of it haphazardly without system or curriculum and without knowing *anything* about the authors, so I didn't know Terrance Hayes was Black. I didn't look at his photo and I didn't read the back of the book, I just saw the title and checked it out from the library and started reading.

Pretty quickly it became clear to me that this was a book inspired by Trump's 2016 election, a book about the violence and decay inherent in modern America (same as it ever was). The first couple lines of the first sonnet reference Langston Hughes and Phillis Wheatley, who are wrongly viewed as the two parents of Black American poetry, when in fact parents—like all ancestors—always appear by the dozens and only get more numerous the further back you go. Anyway, the Hughes and Wheatley references should've been a tip-off that these poems were written by a Black poet who reflects a Black American lyrical perspective. But I'm pretty dense.

So my experience of "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" was one of a poet's Blackness slowly dawning on me as I read, thickheaded, through the book. I'm a white guy from the Internet who views most things through the lens of a white guy from the Internet (I'm never sure whether to capitalize "white" so I don't), and so I read these sonnets and identified with some of them, and identified, and identified, until suddenly I wasn't identifying so much, or there were snippets of disidentification that had been there from the beginning, and then other moments when I felt alienated by the poems or angry at the poet, because you can't be a white American reader of Black American poetry and not get angry and defensive at *some* point, and then I'm like, "Oh wait—Terrance Hayes is Black. Of course he's Black! He wrote Lighthead!" Somehow I knew about "Lighthead," maybe because I listen to NPR, even though I hate NPR. But I remembered "Lighthead" and then it all clicked in my brain who Terrance Hayes was.

That's three whole paragraphs I just wrote about Hayes's identity right there. Will I write three more paragraphs about the sonnets, divorced from commentary about Hayes's racial identity? Is that even possible? Whether or not it's possible, I'll bet you wish I wouldn't write three more paragraphs about any of it, because that's a lot, too much, and I've already written a lot.

But here's one more paragraph about Hayes's perspective, something in the book I didn't identify with but felt moved by: the inevitability of assassination, the relationship (premised on violence) between the American nation and the Black national subject (because you can be a national subject without being treated like a citizen). Maybe there's some kind of Calvinist predestination in the Black American experience, described here by Hayes, because you can't escape what's coming, and what's coming is bad, and what's coming has been decided for you. Maybe that's why Calvinism never really "stuck" with Black American Christianity.

But predestination, yeah, that's why the title of this volume is so great: the assassin is of course in the future. The assassin is always gonna be there. The assassin is in the past too, because of something something outside time. The assassin is inevitable both ways. Look backwards, there he is. Look forward, here he comes.

A couple poems from the book:

"I only intend to send word to my future
Self perpetuation is a war against Time
Travel is essentially the aim of any religion
Is blindness the color one sees under water
Breath can be overshadowed in darkness
The benefits of blackness can seem radical
Black people in America are rarely compulsive
Hi-fivers believe joy is a matter of touching others
Is forbidden the only word God doesn’t know
You have to heal yourself to truly be heroic
You have to think once a day of killing your self
Awareness requires a touch of blindness & self
Importance is the only word God knows
To be free is to live because only the dead are slaves"

And:

"In a parallel world where all Dr. Who's
Are black, I'm the doctor who knows no god
Is more powerful than Time. In a parallel world
Where all the doctors who are black see cops
Box black boys in cop cars & caskets, I'm
The doctor who blacks out whenever he sees
A police box. In a parallel world where doctors
Who box cops in caskets cry doing their jobs,
I disappear inside a skull that's larger on the inside.
Question: if, in a parallel world where every Dr.
Who was black, you were the complex Time Lord,
When & where would you explore? My answer is,
A brother has to know how to time travel & doctor
Himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck."

Every sonnet in this volume is a kind of gunshot, an act of self-defense, and there are plenty of misfires (a little rambling at times but who am I to talk), but when they hit, they hit good. Real good.