Watch Your Language

Praise for Watch Your Language:

“A dazzling homage . . . [Watch Your Language is] a verbal and visual feast that defies genres . . . exhilerating . . . Time and time again, [Hayes] introduces a phrase or form that appears familiar, then radically reinvents it. The results are strange, sometimes surreal and always sublimely surprising . . . [He] continues to devise language well worth watching.” —The Washington Post

“One reads a book like Hayes’s to feel at home in a strange land, to feel one’s enthusiasm answered and challenged, to soothe one’s uncertainty, and to excite it, in order to get more into poetry . . . I get giddy imagining the view if this were the first panoramic glimpse teenagers got of the poetry landscape . . . I don’t think there’s ever been a book like this before. A young Black poet reading this book will see the poetic tradition—the past, as well as the present—as it really is, not one tradition at all, but many, carried forward by many kinds of people who are connected not just by scholars’ analyses, but by community . . . they will feel invited to poetry, and by no less a host than Terrance Hayes, one of the best and most important poets now writing.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Poetry

“A wildly entertaining and honest view into a poet and artist’s rangy mind.” —The Millions

“When one of America’s great poets assembles his poetic origin story in a collage-like collection of mini essays, illustrations, prose fragments, and assorted feuilletons of a life in poetry, it behooves us all to pay attention. In examining his own path to poetry, Terrance Hayes also manages to excavate a century of nearly forgotten African American poets, reminding us all of the very narrow poetic canon that predominates to this day in the academy. Essential reading.” —LitHub

“A freewheeling work of creative originality . . . Equal parts zine, poetic bibliography, and interior atlas to Hayes’ literary inheritance, this imaginative undertaking will intrigue aficionados of the author’s expanding oeuvre and anyone looking for artistic inspiration.” —Booklist