“Something happens everywhere in this country,” Hayes writes. These 70 poems were written after the election of 2016, in the shadow of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and a nationwide surge in hate crimes. “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”Īny real accounting of the art emerging from our own current terrors would be premature, but “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” the new book by Terrance Hayes, has a claim to be among the first fully-fledged works to reckon with the presidency of Donald Trump - and one of the most surprising. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” Lime says. There is a notion - best expressed by Harry Lime, the genial psychopath played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man” - that bad times make for good art.
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