How to Be Drawn

Starred review from February 16, 2015
Hayes delivers another stunner, following up his 2010 National Book Award–winning Lighthead with a collection that sees the poet thinking more deeply about perception—the public and private, the viewed and ignored. In the opening poem, readers receive a warning—“Never mistake what it is for what it looks like”—before being taken through a hall of mirrors, in each one a reflection of race, art, and the makeup of America today. Hayes cops from crime reports and q&as, charts and instructional guides, toying with form to paint the realities of life for modern black Americans. Scenes are drawn with razor sharp lines: NWA plays idly “at a penthouse party with no black people”; the ghosts of lynched slaves are invoked to haunt a “white man/ with Confederate pins.” The poems pull from sources as seemingly disparate as Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and evoke the souls of Walt Whitman and Ralph Ellison. The work hurdles between violent beauty (“I want to be as inexplicable/ as something hanging a dozen feet in the air”) and stark, philosophical truth telling (“Humanity endures because it is,/ at most, an idea”). Hayes manages not only to reassess the visual, but also to ask what we do with the information once we have it.

May 15, 2015

This collection from 2014 MacArthur Fellow Hayes (Lighthead) is a testament both to the author's facility (which can be, as the synopsis says, "mesmerizing") and misguided verbosity. Each of the three sections--"Troubled Bodies," "Invisible Souls," and "A Circling Mind"--includes experiments with form, such as "Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report Part I" (and "Part II"), "Who are the Tribes," and "Some Maps To Indicate Pittsburgh." Overall, though, this book could have used an aggressive editor, especially for the narrative poems, some of which stretch to several pages and rely on voice alone to transmit substance. Even the poems that stray from cliches do so intermittently. Strikingly clever, effectual lines ("moving at a speed that leaves a stain on the breeze" in "The Deer"; or "I was trying to play like the first mechanic/ asked to repair the first car" in "The Rose Has Teeth") are buried within repetition that doesn't seem to serve the poem. VERDICT Though Hayes is an important author to consider, his work here doesn't always measure up.--Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2015
Trouble is how we learn what the soul is, writes Hayes in the voice of a speaker talking about his relationship with his mother, a guard at the prison where James Brown was locked up. This propulsive poem fizzes with stinging cultural and emotional insights, as do all the other surprising (each qualifies), plangent ( How to Draw a Perfect Circle ), and mordantly funny ( We Should Make a Documentary about Spades ) selections in Hayes' (Lighthead, 2010) assured and electrifying fifth collection. A National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow, Hayes writes far-reaching yet intimate monologues that are simultaneously subtle and hard-hitting; he unearths shards of shameful antebellum history and takes measure of the current state of moral and political paralysis. A grandly imaginative and cunningly inventive poet, he performs spirited wordplay and bold formal improvisations using a Q&A, a crime report, an annotated table of contents, and textbook pages. His subjects are just as commandingly varied and provocative, from a homage to Ralph Ellison to musings on home, music, photography, drawing, family, and love. Expansive, original, resounding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)