Watch Your Language
Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
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Watch Your Language
Narrated by:
Terrance Hayes
Buy Now for $21.99
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Narrated by:
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Terrance Hayes
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By:
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Terrance Hayes
About this listen
Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes's 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 ("I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography"), 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. "If you don't see suffering's potential as art, will it remain suffering?" he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes's astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet's routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.
* This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF with visual poems.
Critic Reviews
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
“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
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