In 1994, Wanda Coleman published American Sonnets, full of sonnets (14 lines, 10 syllables) that—among other things—don’t rhyme. The sonnets in Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) pay tribute to Coleman, and continue her project of experimentation with an old, often revered form. For Slate, Stephanie Burt writes about Hayes, American sonnets, and confinement: “Lyric poetry—the poet imagines—works by finding words for someone’s passions, which could also be your own: it can get you out of your one situation, your one body, your one life, though it will not literally free you from a literal jail.” Hayes’s sonnets may intentionally evoke feelings of confinement or discomfort in us, but they also contain the potential to lead toward liberation.
On American Sonnets
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Some of the intrigue and fascination with artificial intelligence is very much in the realm of fantasy, because it seems that, so far, algorithms tend to accelerate bias and emphasize the worst aspects of human behavior.
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How Yasmin Zaher Wrote the Year’s Best New York City Novel
"This is going to sound absurd, but in a novel, you can say the truth, and in journalism, you cannot."
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Things Got Weird: On the Early ‘90s Crack-Up
Ganz vividly renders the early 1990s’ shouty yet blankly confused alienations along with the endlessly gassy and vituperative “whither America?” debates.
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The Beguiling Crónicas of Hebe Uhart
'A Question of Belonging' is marked by an unerring belief that a good story can be found almost anywhere.
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