Praise for Watch Your Language "A dazzling homage . . . [
Watch Your Language is] a verbal and visual feast that defies genres . . . exhilerating . . . Time and time again, [Hayes] introduces a phrase or form that appears familiar, then radically reinvents it. The results are strange, sometimes surreal and always sublimely surprising . . . [He] continues to devise language well worth watching." --
The Washington Post "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 "A wildly entertaining and honest view into a poet and artist's rangy mind." --
The Millions "When one of America's great poets assembles his poetic origin story in a collage-like collection of mini essays, illustrations, prose fragments, and assorted feuilletons of a life in poetry, it behooves us all to pay attention. In examining his own path to poetry, Terrance Hayes also manages to excavate a century of nearly forgotten African American poets, reminding us all of the very narrow poetic canon that predominates to this day in the academy. Essential reading." --
LitHub "A freewheeling work of creative originality . . . Equal parts zine, poetic bibliography, and interior atlas to Hayes' literary inheritance, this imaginative undertaking will intrigue aficionados of the author's expanding oeuvre and anyone looking for artistic inspiration." --
Booklist
