Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
Terrance Hayes
Penguin Books
Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes’ brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison’s aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark, Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry.
Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers.