In 2018, Terrance Hayes published seventy sonnets under the exact same title and never once explained why one poem needed to become seventy. Written in the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency and shaped by the particular pressure of that moment, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin went on to become a finalist for the National Book Award and, the following year, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Hayes borrows his structural conceit from Wanda Coleman, whose own American Sonnets sequence he is answering and extending across decades. The repetition here is not a gimmick or a branding exercise. It is the argument the whole book is making.
One Title, Seventy Times
Every poem in this collection is called “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin,” which means the reader loses the usual signposts — no titles to distinguish one meditation from the next, no table of contents that tells you what you’re walking into. Instead the poems bleed into each other, and that blur is deliberate. Hayes treats the sonnet the way earlier Black poets have treated it before him: as a form that is both confinement and shelter, a structure tight enough to trap a subject and stable enough to protect one. Fourteen lines become a place to hide and a place to be found at the same time.
The effect compounds at the very end of the book, where Hayes builds several additional sonnets entirely out of the first lines of the sonnets that came before — a variation on the classical crown of sonnets, the form in which poets traditionally link a sequence by repeating a closing line as the next poem’s opening line. A crown is usually an act of celebration, assembled from a poet’s strongest material. Hayes builds his instead from fragments pulled out of their original context and set back to work, so the closing pages read less like a victory lap and more like an index of everything the book never finished saying.
The sonnet, in Hayes’s hands, is not a container the poems fill and complete. It is a wound the book keeps reopening, on purpose, seventy times.
Talking to the Assassin
Hayes spends much of the book in direct address, speaking to an “assassin” and to “America” who are never quite pinned down — sometimes a specific historical figure, sometimes an entire inherited system, sometimes simply whoever happens to be reading. In one of the book’s sharpest turns, he uses the image of currency to indict the country’s founders directly: the faces printed on American money are, for Hayes, the faces of men who built their fortunes on slavery, which makes the ordinary act of carrying cash a small daily transaction with the past. Elsewhere, though, Hayes extends an uncomfortable and deliberate empathy toward the very figure he is naming as a threat — a soldier, a police officer, someone who may have been shaped into violence rather than born to it. He is willing to admit that his assassin might also believe, sincerely, that he is acting in the interest of the greater good. That refusal to let anger simplify into caricature is one of the book’s harder achievements.
What It Means to Be American
The book keeps returning to a version of the same question: what does it mean to be Black, and to be American, and to have those two facts refuse to reconcile. Hayes is interested in how much of what gets called American culture — its music, its language, its style — has Black origins that the culture at large has learned to forget, even as it keeps consuming the product. He is just as interested in democracy itself as a failing structure, and in one poem he pushes the sonnet toward near-nonsense, stacking invented, rhyme-driven language on top of real words until the whole apparatus of government starts to sound like it’s stumbling over its own feet. It's a formal joke with real teeth: the poem sounds clumsy because Hayes wants the reader to hear the clumsiness of what it's describing.
The Names Alive
Hayes doesn’t let the book’s politics stay abstract. He names names — John Wilkes Booth alongside Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who murdered Emmett Till and were acquitted by an all-white jury — and draws a direct line between the killers history remembers and the ones it has chosen to let go. Elsewhere he catalogs, without flinching and without turning it into spectacle, the range of methods by which Black Americans have been killed across the country’s history. The point isn’t to shock. It’s to insist that these deaths be named specifically rather than folded into a vague, easier-to-swallow abstraction, and to make clear that the ghosts in question are not going to be assassinated a second time by being forgotten.
Love, Unresolved
For a book this politically loaded, it is also, quietly, a book about love — about loneliness, about mothers, about what it means to make a life alongside someone else. Hayes turns to Greek myth at one point and inverts it, arguing that Eurydice, not Orpheus, is the real poet of that story, since it’s her voice we never actually get to hear. It’s a small revision with a large implication: that the muse has usually been doing more of the work than the myth credits her for, and that what we learn from loving ourselves might matter as much as what we learn from loving anyone else. These gentler poems don’t relieve the pressure of the book’s politics so much as sit inside it, which is, in the end, the more honest thing to do.
What makes American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin hold together, despite — or because of — seventy identical titles, is that Hayes never treats the sonnet as a box to be filled and checked off. Each one reopens the same argument from a slightly different angle, and by the time the book folds back on itself in its closing crown, the repetition has stopped feeling like a formal constraint and started to feel like the only honest way to write about a country that keeps repeating itself too.
