How to Be Drawn

by Terrance Hayes

Overview

A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award

In How to Be Drawn, his daring fifth collection, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes’s background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes’s award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143126881
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/31/2015
Series:	Penguin Poets
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.03(w) x 8.97(h) x 0.31(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

 

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/16/2015
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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for How to Be Drawn
 
“Hayes’s work fits strong emotions into virtuoso forms. . .He is a poet of swallowed garrulity, imagined riposte, mock correction, and interior litigation. . .[his] poems are like a Pixar version of the mental marionette show, a dazzling space crammed with comic jabs.”—Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
                                                                         
“Music serves as both an animating force and resonant presence in Hayes’s poems. . .Hayes occupies this musical mode like a connoisseur and deploys it like a virtuoso.  His lines can (and do) freely drift between themes of blackness, masculinity, history, family, art, and language, and freely shift between forms.”—The Boston Globe
                                                                          
“One of the most exciting and imaginative poets at work in America today. . .though his writing, with its mix of intellectual agility and sonic density, sounds far more like hip hop, it stands, temperamentally, in the tradition of older kinds of music:  folk ballads, for example, or the blues, traditions that take hardship as a given and seek solace, entertainment, and communion in its midst.”—Slate
                                                                            
“Both a fascinating and liberating collection of poems. As it kicks against our staid definition of poetry it offers new and refreshing possibilities for the artform.”—The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“Another stunner, a collection that sees the poet thinking more deeply about perception – the public and private, the viewed and the ignored. . .the work hurdles between violent beauty and stark, philosophical truth telling.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Assured and electrifying. . .a grandly imaginative and cunningly inventive poet. . .Hayes writes far-reaching yet intimate monologues that are simultaneously subtle and hard-hitting. . .Expansive, original, resounding.”—ALA Booklist
 
“Reading Terrance Hayes’ thick, gorgeous, knowing, endlessly surprising poems is like spending a long evening with your most soulful and garrulous friend, one you haven’t seen in ages.  His poems are protean; you never know when they will shape-shift or turn a corner.  Hayes and his poems are brilliant, which is to say, bedazzling but also filled with illuminating light that shows us things we hadn’t seen before.”—Elizabeth Alexander

From the Publisher

05/15/2015
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 clichés 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

Library Journal