So to Speak

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from the
National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead

Since the publication of his first collection, Muscular Music,
in 1999, Terrance Hayes has been one of America’s most exciting and
innovative poets, winning acclaim for sly, twisting, jazzy poems that put invincibly
restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions (The New York
Times Book Review).

A tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds, talking cats tell jokes in
the Jim Crow South, and a father addresses his daughter in the lyric fables,
folk sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas of
So to Speak, Hayes’s seventh collection. Bob Ross paints your
portrait, green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and elegies for the late David Berman and
George Floyd unfold amid the pandemic. These wondrous poems are lyric
germinations of the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as
Hayes shapes language into figures of music and music into figures of
language.