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Terrance Hayes (born 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina) is one of the biggest names in contemporary US American poetry. He has published seven collections of poetry, including the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, Lighthead (Penguin Books 2010), and American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin Books 2018), a crown of sonnets that was begun after Donald Trump was elected president. In this volume, Hayes was influenced by Wanda Coleman and breaks the sonnet form apart with twists and turns and playful ambiguities: “I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.” And in his latest volume So To Speak (Penguin Books 2023), Hayes updates rigid poetic forms such as sonnets, ghazals, and sestinas in didactic poems such as “DIY Sestina: What Does This Piece Remind You Of?” This poem is preceded by a tabular template to write descriptions of images in the sestina form. Hayes also uses this resistance to the prescribed formal constraints and norms as a way to produce the content. He frequently collages the voices and experiences of Black artists and from African American history, uniting poetic potential with an exploration of the self: “If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering? / If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?”