American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a 2018 collection of more than seventy sonnets by Terrance Hayes. Written after the 2016 American elections, this collection treats topics like racism, masculinity, and politics. It was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for poetry, [1] and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for 2018. [2]
The title of the collection, "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" (singularized to “American Sonnet”) is also the title of each poem in the book. Each sonnet addresses contemporary issues of American society and its politics. After the 2016 U.S election, the author decided to write political poems. and directly addresses Donald Trump in some poems and does not hesitate to mock him, calling him "Mister Trumpet".
The collection was inspired by Wanda Coleman's series of "American Sonnets" [3] In the sonnets Hayes deplores the rising violence related to racism in America. [3] He raises some old themes in American literature like the cage of masculinity or the relationship between father and son in passages like: “Christianity is a religion built around a father/Who does not rescue his son. It is the story/of a son whose father is a ghost." [3]
Spencer Hupp of The Sewanee Review sees the collection as a reminder of American suffering, because of racial violence but with hope for a better future: "If this book’s 1,148 uneven but often stunning lines prove anything, it’s that the threat of hate, the hope for personal redemption, and the possibility for reconciliation can be as much alive in art as they are in the culture that creates it." [4]
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
John Orley Allen Tate, known professionally as Allen Tate, was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and poet laureate from 1943 to 1944.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Kevin Powell is an American writer, activist, and television personality. He is the author of 14 books, including The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood and When We Free the World published in 2020. Powell was a senior writer during the founding years of Vibe magazine from 1992 to 1996. Powell's activism has focused on ending poverty, advocating for social justice and counteracting violence against women and girls through local, national and international initiatives. He was a Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York, in 2008 and 2010.
David Lehman is an American poet, non-fiction writer, and literary critic, and the founder and series editor for The Best American Poetry. He was a writer and freelance journalist for fifteen years, writing for such publications as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. In 2006, Lehman served as Editor for the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. He taught and was the Poetry Coordinator at The New School in New York City until May 2018.
The Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry is awarded biennially by the Library of Congress on behalf of the nation in recognition for the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. The award is overseen by the Library of Congress Center for the Book.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is a prize for poetry awarded by the T. S. Eliot Foundation. For many years it was awarded by the Eliots' Poetry Book Society (UK) to "the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or the Republic of Ireland" in any particular year. The Prize was inaugurated in 1993 in celebration of the Poetry Book Society's 40th birthday and in honour of its founding poet, T. S. Eliot. Since its inception, the prize money was donated by Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot and more recently it has been given by the T. S. Eliot Estate.
Daniel Gerard Hoffman was an American poet, essayist, and academic. He was appointed the twenty-second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1973.
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
Rhina Polonia Espaillat is a bilingual Dominican-American poet and translator who is affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. She has published eleven collections of poetry. Her work has been included in many popular anthologies, including The Heath Introduction to Poetry ; The Muse Strikes Back ; and In Other Words: Literature by Latinas of the U.S..
Anthony Joseph FRSL is a British/Trinidadian poet, novelist, musician and academic. In 2023, he was awarded the T. S. Eliot Prize for his book Sonnets for Albert.
A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets thematically unified to create a long work, although generally, unlike the stanza, each sonnet so connected can also be read as a meaningful separate unit.
Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles".
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Craig Blais is an American poet and academic. He is an associate professor of English at Anna Maria College.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
How to Be Drawn is a poetry collection by Terrance Hayes. The poems take on themes of racial individuality, social prejudices, and personal losses in everyday life. The main focus of the poems are self care for an individual's image or personal hardships. The collection was a finalist for several awards. It was first published in 2015 by the Penguin Group.
Opponents of the alt-right have not reached a consensus on how to deal with it. Some opponents emphasized "calling out" tactics, labelling the alt-right with terms like "racist", "sexist", "homophobic", and "white supremacist" in the belief that doing so would scare people away from it. Many commentators urged journalists not to refer to the alt-right by its chosen name, but rather with terms like "neo-Nazi". There was much discussion within U.S. public discourse as to how to avoid the "normalization" of the alt-right. The activist group Stop Normalizing, which opposes the normalization of terms like alt-right, developed the "Stop Normalizing Alt Right" Chrome extension. The extension went viral shortly after the release of Stop Normalizing's website. The extension changes the term "alt-right" on webpages to "white supremacy". The extension and group were founded by a New York-based advertising and media professional under the pseudonym George Zola.