I'm Linda Holmes. This is NPR's Book of the Day. When poet Terrence Hayes talks about writing, he talks about a practice, a way that he writes, that he continues writing, that he thinks about writing. He talks to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about his new collections, so to speak, and about how that practice led to a poem during the earliest

protests after the death of George Floyd. That practice can also be very personal, of course.

Hayes explains what it's like to write intimately about your own family in words they might

never read. Even words, maybe you hope they won't ever read.

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The poet Terence Hayes writes words that make it feel like he is holding up a mirror to himself,

to daily news headlines, to history.

Hayes is a national book award winner,

also winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, and author of a new collection of poems just out. It is titled, So to Speak. Terrence Hayes, so good to have you with us. Very happy to be here. Thank you,

Mary Louise. Yeah. So when you hold up this mirror,

and I don't know if that's the way it feels to you, but it was the way it felt to me reading these,

you hold up this mirror and then the reflections are refracting and intertwining and double back on each other.

There was one poem that just reading it silently by myself on the page, I really felt this. And it's a poem

about George Floyd. Tell me what was going on in your head as you wrote it. And then I'm

going to let people listen to you read it. Well, the idea of the mirror is interesting because I do

...