Lighthead: Poems

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry

Watch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018

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.

Author: Terrance Hayes
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 03/30/2010
Pages: 112
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.28lbs
Size: 8.56h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780143116967
Audience: Young Adult


Award: National Book Critics Circle Award - Finalist
Award: Hurston/Wright LEGACY Award - Nominee
Award: National Book Awards - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/22/2010 pg. 53
Library Journal 04/15/2010 pg. 89
New York Times Book Review 04/25/2010 pg. 18
New Yorker (The) 05/11/2015 pg. 78

About the Author
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.