Lighthead (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Terrance Hayes (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 30, 2010 | Series: Poets, Penguin

From an award-winning poet, a new collection in which the political and the personal converge in innovative and beautiful ways

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presenta­tion format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The deservedly acclaimed Hayes returns in his fourth book with the kinds of sly, twisting, hip, jazzy poems his fans have come to expect, but also with a new somberness of tone and mature caution. You can spend your whole life/ doing no more than preparing for life and thinking/ 'Is this all there is?' warns the book's opening poem. Later, in a book that thinks hard about fatherhood, family, and mortality, Hayes asks, Who cannot think// Our elegies are endless endlessly and the words/ We put to them too often unheard and hurried? Elsewhere, Hayes treats memory with his signature wit: I believe, as the elephant must,/ that everything is punctured by the tusks of Nostalgia. The book also contains a surprisingly effective series of poems based on a form called pecha kucha, which, Hayes explains, is a type of Japanese business presentation in which the presenter must riff on a series of slides or images; Hayes adapts this form by bracketing the title or slide he's riffing on (The Magic of Magic and The Function of Fiction are two examples) and following with a four- or five-line stanza. The poems free-associate through their triggers, but images and themes satisfyingly resurface. Hayes, now entering mid-career, remains one of our best poets. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Terrance Hayes received an MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. He was the recipient of a 1999 Whiting Writers Award, and his first collection of poetry, Muscular Music, was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 2000. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; 1 edition (March 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143116967
• ISBN-13: 978-0143116967
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.3 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971. Lighthead, his most recent poetry collection, won the 2010 National Book Award. His third collection, Wind in a Box (Pengiuin 2006), was named one of the best 100 books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. His other books of poetry are Muscular Music (1999), which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Hip Logic (2002), which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, three Best American Poetry selections, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Tenuousness July 1, 2010

By Glynn Young VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 dead
Who are not dead do not dream.

A house of damaged translations
Task married to distraction

As in a bucket left in a storm
A choir singing in the rain like fish

Acquiring air under water
Prayer and sin the body

Performs to know it is alive
Lit from the inside by reckoning

As in a city
Which 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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bring A Lot of Different Stuff Together in a New Way March 18, 2012

By Jesse

Format:Paperback

In this book, Terrence Hayes does something that I've never quite seen done before; he's smoothly synthesized the sound-and-emotion-oriented style of spoken-word poetry with the artful arrangement and order of more conceptual, academic poetry. For that, I have to give him some five-star love, even though a lot of the poems talk a lot about African-American identity and racism in a way that I have a hard time taking into my own experience. Yet the guy also references David Bowie, Wallace Stevens, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Antony and the Johnsons...so it's blazingly clear that he isn't a one-trick rapper/poet.

Really though, some dazzling stuff here, particularly his invention of the "pecha kucha" form (based on a style of Japanese slideshow used for business presentations). The tension between the "slides"/stanzas and their individual titles fleshes out the concepts in an even deeper way, even beyond the surface-level puzzles that he puts forward, so that the pieces end up working on multiple levels and kind of driving you insane and force you to read them over and over, getting more and more out of them each time. There's some game-changing stuff in there.

As mentioned before, I love how omnivorous he is with his references and also with his themes; love, family, the personal vs. cultural/racial history, music...there's even some funny stuff in there too!

For all the brou-ha-ha about the National Book Award committee being so ivory-tower-y, I can't fault them picking this book, at least. It's just so fluid and deft and thoughtful, and perfectly emblematic of how other cultures are slowly infiltrating and destroying the "old dead white men" paradigm of modern poetry, and re-making it into something way more strong and deep and hardy, giving it more of a fighting chance to become a significant part of more people's lives. This is a service Hayes does without being at all self-conscious, and the fruits of his labor are pretty miraculous.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Smile October 11, 2011

By Dr. Wilson Trivino

Format:Paperback

"I'm not shy, I'm sober" states Terrance Haynes in Lighthead and then follows that with "This is Not an Exit" means "Do not Enter" in a poem titled Twenty-Six Imaginary T-Shirts.
In Lighthead by Terrance Hayes the poems cover the gambit of sexuality, failure, and triumph.
In God is An American has a stanza "I love words. When we make love in the morning/ your skin damp from a shower, the day calms".
The soulful book captures the essence of change in a continuing shifting world.