Terrance Hayes

This chapter presents Terrance Hayes as a contemporary poet who continues to implement and push back against lyric reading as handed down and evolving from the New Critics. It recounts the experiments of Hayes's first book that began with a simple desire to challenge, impress, and piss off the people. It mentions how Hayes's work continues to have the ambivalent self-consciousness that shapes how one writes about one's self. The chapter talks about Hayes's main comic iridescence between expression and something beyond expression. It looks at centrifugal effects of Haye's poetry that seem in excess of a poem's meaning as it affirms a view of both a mind and a lyric as taking in more than their most visible apparent subjects.