Like Claudia Rankine’s collection Citizen, Hayes’s book forms a sustained meditation on what it is to be black and living in America. On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black Who is “good” and who is “bad” when:ĭragging herself through the traffic with her nails Someone is praying, someone is prey.” “It’s not the bad people who are brave/ I fear,” writes Hayes, “it’s the good people who are afraid”, but he also troubles this distinction. America’s problems go deeper: “Something happens everywhere in this country/ Every day. He becomes “Mister Trumpet” the speaker of one sonnet asks, “Are you not the colour of this country’s current threat/ Advisory?”īut in refusing to name Trump, even as he ghosts the collection, Hayes refuses to minimise the gravity of the political crises we face by pinning them to any one figure. Hayes began writing this, his seventh collection, in response to Donald Trump’s presidential election, and several of the poems here indirectly address the politician.
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