Hip Logic

""Forgive this letter covered in paint. There are no rags around me. I can't tell you where I am, but where I ain't."" Selected by Cornelius Eady for the National Poetry Series, Terrance Hayes's Hip Logic is divided into five sections of fast-paced monologues and mania, leavened by ""Autumn"" (""its scent of cooling grease like the scent you inhaled once along the rim of a girl's collar"") and portraits of greater and lesser heroes, from Homer and Audre Lorde to Shaft and Mr. T: ""How to hulk through Chicago in a hedgerow afro, an ox-grunt kicking dust behind the teeth; those eighteen glammering gold chains around the throat of pity, that fat hollow medallionlike the sun on a leash "" (June)