Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is a contemporary American poet born in 1971. He is known for his collections American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins and To Float In The Space Between. The latter won the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

At Pegasus

by Terrance Hayes

‘At Pegasus’ by Terrance Hayes is a powerful poem about identity that uses a youthful memory and a contemporary experience to speak about life.

This is a truly beautiful Terrance Hayes poem that fuses together a memory of the speaker's youth with his contemporary experience in a gay club. The scene of dancing men in front of him reminds him of his youth and how he used to understand the world in the same way that he sees these men understanding it. This triggers a skillfully delivered recollection of youth.

How could I not find them

beautiful, the way they dive & spill

into each other,

Explore more poems from Terrance Hayes

We Should Make a Documentary About Spades

by Terrance Hayes

‘We Should Make a Documentary About Spades’ is written by contemporary American poet Terrance Hayes. This imaginary piece explores the theme of racism and implicitly comments on the history of Spades.