Product Description
So to Speak
Author(s): Terrance Hayes
Format: Paperback
A dazzling collection of poems from the T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Since the publication of his first book, Muscular Music, in 1999, Terrance Hayes has been one of America's most exciting and innovative poets, winning acclaim for his sly, twisting, jazzy poems, and his mastery of emotive, restless wordplay.
In So to Speak, his seventh collection, 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 lyric fables, folk sonnets, quarantine quatrains and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas, 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 poems lyrically capture the often-incomprehensible predicaments of the present, as Hayes shapes music into language, and language into music.
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.
For custom orders and quotes: shop@schoolspace.co.za
© 2026 Schoolspace. This product description is the exclusive intellectual property of the publisher, protected under copyright law. Unauthorized use, adaption, or copying is strictly prohibited.
