There seems to be more oppositional clarity in the poet’s concept of God. Hayes’s long conversation with cherished Black writers and mentors turns some of these sonnets against their dedicatory “assassin” into praise poems. White aggressors are excoriated with fierce, alliterative wrath, but not every poem is single-mindedly wrathful: even the aggressor is permitted shades of guilt and “blindness”. The political and emotional angle throughout Hayes’ collection is as subtly and variously registered as the face of the assassin. If any reader is, like me, tempted to look for a credo, the poem keeps warning us to hold on.

It’s is a constant unfurling of voltas – “turns” or double-takes – conjured by raising the power of syntax over punctuation.

The “volta” is a key component in his own renovation of sonnet form, and this week’s poem takes the technique to soul-blowing extremes. “When asked for a definition she called poems jazz sonnets ‘with certain properties-progression, improvisation, mimicry, etc,” he adds (Coleman’s American Sonnet 35 can be heard here) and concludes: “I decided to have fun - to blow my soul.” Many white people still do not question their own role in perpetuating racial injustice.In the collection, Hayes acknowledges the poet Wanda Coleman (1946-2013) with “tremendous gratitude” for the term American Sonnet, and quotes an interview in which she interestingly describes how she would set the form as a writing assignment. The irony is that such violence stares people in the face in the form of police brutality, murders by white supremacists, and other monstrous acts, yet the myth of race-blind America persists. The sort of racial injustice which is the theme of Hayes’s sonnet cycle is not merely prejudice and bias but outright violence against Black Americans. The poet uses the ubiquitous all-American image of the “gym” to cleverly trace a line between contemporary reality and the historic oppression of the Jim Crow laws. Racial injustice did not end with the ending of the Jim Crow laws instead, it morphed into many different forms and exists in these forms as everyday reality. The cycle of killing-rebirth-killing becomes not just plausible but certain, when it becomes clear that the “you” also stands for the Black self and the myth of an egalitarian America. The term “past and future assassin” is puzzling and interesting, since it evokes the idea that the speaker-self will be killed over and over again. As its common title states, the sonnet is addressed to the speaker’s past and future assassin.

My past and future assassin