Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry Audiobook

From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak

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.

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"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