While I did both the audiobook and the book, the audiobook helped draw attention to items I might not have noticed otherwise. It repeats one poem and leaves out another. I suspect this is an accident that may be rectified later on.
First, each sonnet is titled "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin." When I got the book, I just assumed that it was the book title repeated on each page. No, that's the name of every poem. This presents a number of possibilities.
Is this just one poem? The second item (also noticed via the audiobook--discussed below) will appear to bolster this idea. And the acknowledgements don't mention "poems." However, the book title is American Sonnets, plural. Maybe someone forced that title on him? Or maybe the multiple sonnets work as one.
Is each sonnet a revision? You'd think the sonnets would be closer in alignment where the poet got closer to the thing he wanted to write.
A third possibility is that each poem has a generic title as a way of untitling, but clearly it'd be easier to have no title if he'd wanted them untitled.
The fourth and possibly best possibility is that he wants this title to apply seventy different ways to seventy sonnets. I'm not sure that they do except in a few cases. It'd be easier to apply if it didn't insist on the duality of "Past and Future" in each. Maybe it isn't intended to fully apply, but then he could have left out "Past and Future" entirely.
The second thing one notices via the audio (although some may have noticed without the nudge) is that the first-line index is presented as a series of five sonnets, but listed and read as one poem. It's certainly interesting although I'm not yet convinced it works except as a grab-bag of interesting lines. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, of course. It might be a good cue that this series is meant to be read as one poem (see above).
According to the back matter, this was "Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency," which suggests political subject matter, which that is here, but there is also variety--from the personal to the political. Also the tone shifts as well.
The first poem sets the stage for poetry that may not fully recognize what it is or where it's headed:
"The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes...but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors....
skittery, [Sylvia Plath] thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus....
meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.
So accident, chance lead the poet to meanings he meant and meanings he didn't know he meant. This may explain the index--a happy experiment of first lines tossed in a stew to see what comes about. It helps that some of those opening lines repeat (regarding "black male hysteria" which is a quote he says in the notes he may be misremembering).
A handful of poems do attack Trump head on. If you're okay with attacking Obama, then you should be fine with attacks on Trump. And vice versa. (Of course, it rarely works that way. It's great when the leaders of opposite party are attacked. Politics is heroin.)
I'm just interested in aesthetics (sound, imagery, line breaks), not the politics. Here are some good lines (or bad ones if you like Trump):
Are you not the color of this country's current threat
Advistory?...
Color of the quartered cantaloupe
Beside the tiers of easily bruised bananas cowering
In towers of yellow skin? And of Caligula's copper-toned
Jabber-jaw jammed with grapes shaped like the eyeballs
of blind people?...
Pomp & pumpkin pompadour,
Are you not a flame of hollow Hellos & Hell nos
The sonnets here (as the last) do not necessarily have turns or voltas. Hayes writes the "Voltas [are] of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough."
That last line ends "To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed." This is the kind of volta that appears here. You might suppose that the "you" is Trump. It may or may not be. It may be the reader. It may be the author. In fact, you might suppose that Trump and past America are the assassins, but later, we learn that the speaker's self may be also involved. This complexity adds the necessary layer of richness to the poem(s):
I tend to repeat my mistakes. I'm a camera
With no cameraman, my own personal
Assistant & assassin.
and
He sings "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note"...
Leroi Jones
Wrote the night before Baraka put a bullet in him.
Note: LeRoi Jones is Amiri Baraka, hence the "song" he sings.
"You assassinate..." is a litany in one sonnet and concludes "You will never assassinate my ghosts." "Probably," he writes in a later sonnet, "our ghosts are allergic to us.... / This bitter earth is a song / Clogging the mouth before it is swallowed or spat out."
He does talk about Christianity and gets the details and essence wrong, but hey, he's mad-libbing to the profit of his poems: "Christianity... / is the story / Of a son whose father is a ghost." Later, he writes, "After blackness was invented / People began seeing ghosts.
The current culture conspires to perpetuate the past, however subtly and unintentionally:
Even the most kindhearted white woman...
may find her tongue...
Chanting n-words... inwardly
Softly before she can catch herself...
what is inward, is absorbed.
Hayes himself uses the term, albeit usually the phonetic version:
It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga...
one whose master has no Lord....
You will always be my nigga, I say to the mirror
The best poem is "In a parallel world where all Dr. Who's / Are black." (I'll link to it if I can find it online.... Not found. You'll have to look it up. It's toward the end.)
