Hi, before we begin, I want to warn you that today's episode contains strong language that some listeners may find offensive.

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots! Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good news?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt. This is Bookworm, and today my guest is Terrence Hayes.

Terence has been nominated for an LA Times Book Festival Poetry Prize. You know, Emily Dickinson says that a poem should take the top of your head off.

And isn't that the way she says?

That's what she says.

Yeah.

That's exactly right.

And his poems take the top of my head off.

Let's begin by hearing one of his poems.

This is Terrence Hayes from the book American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin.

Thanks. And this poem is called American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, like all of the poems, actually.

But in a few of them, I'm just trying to give you a definition. So this is probably a good place to start.

American Sonnet for my past and future assassin. I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, part panic closet, a little room in a house set of flame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat grinder,

to separate the song of the bird from the bone. I lock your persona in a dream-inducing

sleeper hold while your better selves watch from the bleachers. I make you both gym and crow here.

As the crow, you undergo a beautiful catharsis

trapped one night in the shadows of the gym.

...