Lighthead: Poems (National Book Award Winner) (Penguin Poets)

I stayed up all night reading LIGHTHEAD by Terrance Hayes #sealeychallenge day five. I just want to lie down & sleep & dream in this big bed of poetry TH made. It was one of his older books I hadn’t read & once I got in that room I was so dazzled & struck dumb. Poems about time, memory, fiction, blackness, sex, brothers, God & dreams, & as always with this poet, one of our greatest, every line & image, every scratch sings, so much music loaded into every syllable.“Ladies and Gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state/ I am here because I could never get the hang of Time/““I’d rather have what my daddy calls/ “skrimp.” He says “discrete” and means the street/ just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive:/ that’s poetry. Not the noise, but it’s rhythm. An arrangement/ of derangement said; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry”

This was my first collection of Terrance Hayes work and I was hooked from the first. He expresses real passion in his writing. He crafts each poem, stating things with precision, choosing his words carefully so that the impact lies in the conciseness of his statements. Some of his poems are strong statements about the hardships in life and then you turn the page and find a delightfully humorous poem such as "Lighthead's Guide To Addiction." It was brilliant. Hayes is a professor and his literary background and skill is reflected in the masterful way he uses words. I enjoyed reading his works so much that I looked up Terrance Hayes on the internet and watched his acceptance speech for when he received the National Book Award for this work. He was a delightful man with a real twinkle in his eye, someone with verve who is passionate in expressing himself. I will definitely purchase more of his works.

To read "Lighthead: Poems" by Terrance Hayes is to enter a world that's distinctly uncomfortable, almost jarring, as if the familiar has become dislocated. Perhaps it's like experiencing lightheadedness, except it's experiencing it as a state of normal. And you know this from the beginning of this collection of poems: "Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state, / I am here because I could never get the hang of Time. / This hour, for example, would be like all the others / were it not for the rain falling through the roof. / I'd better not be too explicit..."(from "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy").Time in these poems, for example, is itself not so much relative as tenuous, as if it's always slipping away or defined by other tenuous and temporary things. In a related poems group entitled "Three Measures of Time," his brother tells time by food ("The past is nutritious; the past is there on the table / with the hair you know is Ma's color..."); his father tells time by smell ("The smell / of barbeque in a sentence, the scent / long gone flat as money")' and his mother by "none of the hours jumping at the window. /By the joblessness of God and the body / beneath a floral bedsheet..."Place, too, is something ephemeral, as in "Fish Head for Katrina:"The mouth is where the deadWho are not dead do not dream.A house of damaged translationsTask married to distractionAs in a bucket left in a stormA choir singing in the rain like fishAcquiring air under waterPrayer and sin the bodyPerforms to know it is aliveLit from the inside by reckoningAs in a cityWhich is no longer a city...In "Carp Poem," the poet is visiting the New Orleans Parish Jail to meet with 20 prisoners to talk about...poetry. As the poet walks by the cells, the prisoners become like fish in a pond, each prisoner's orange jumpsuit become the gold scales of the carp. Even prison is not what it seems to be.There are other ways to slice Hayes' poems - through the filters of race, gender, experience, even age. But the tenuousness of life is what "Lighthead" seems to be most about, a tenuousness rendered with grace.

A lovely, moving collection. I read it the same way I consume my favorite foods - in small quantities, hoarding and savoring so that it doesn't get over too soon. It's an understatement to say that some of his lines set my hair on fire, they shook me up good.

Read this.

Good

Fantastic and accessible. I got to meet Terrence two weeks after buying this book, and he truly does write in his own voice.

Could not read as so filled with underlines and notes.

Powerful book!