School of Distance Education

Lock You in an American Sonnet 
by Terence Hayes 
Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, 
SouthCarolina, on November 18, 1971. He is the author 
ofeight collections of poetry, including 
American 
Sonnetsfor My Past and Future Assassin(2018), Wind in 
a Box
(2006), 
Hip Logic
(2002). In his poems, in which 
he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes 
considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and 
masculinity. Terrance Hayes’s poetry collection, 
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
contends with America’s past, present, and future selves 
from the vantages of racism and systemic oppression.
Terence Hayes is a black american poet who 
expresses his experiences as a black man in America. 
The poem does not give out racial themes right away. 
But it is quite clear by the use if metaphors and allusions 
that the poet is addressing black Americans. The poem 
begins in a contrastive note, first prison then a panic 
closet. Both are claustrophobic and surrounded by 
danger. The fire implicates danger. The poet then forms 
an image that is part meat grinder and part music box. A 
juxtaposition of violence and love. Then he goes on to 
describe an assassin and a better/ alternate self. Both of 
them are versions of the poet himself. Then there’s the 
subtle reference to Jim Crow laws, with use of the terms 
such as ‘gym' and ‘crow'.
I make you a box of darkness 
with a bird in its heart. 
Once again the bird is in a cage. 
The inescapable cycle of hatred continues. The 
experience of black Americans is a constant self love 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
21 
and self hatred, a separation of the “song of the bird from 
bone”.
The physical structures of confinement are 
images of the oppressive power structure, and birds 
represent the vulnerability of African Americans. The 
sonnets themselves are relatively free and diverse. 
They’re mostly unrhymed. They defy tradition and forge 
a path of its own.