It's probably harder to stay on top of Poetry than any other form, as poems are scattered hither and yon, here and there in every imaginable type of publication, so a best of the year is especially valuable here.

How To Be Drawn has arrived!  The latest volume of poetry by Pittsburgh's own MacArthur Fellow, Terrance Hayes, this 100 page collection is divided into three parts, each composed of ten pieces (decalogues?) --Troubled Bodies; Invisible Souls; A Circling Mind -- followed by an epiloguical closer.  While firmly grounded in Hayes's own personal landscape, the thirty-one poems collected here roam the world, from "Russia's red-light districts" to New York's Chinatown, explore histories and cultures, and celebrate a cornucopia of creators and creative forms -- most abundantly, musicians and music; most succinctly, writers and writing; and, most centrally (and, from the vantage point here at The Copacetic Comics Company, most intriguingly) visual artists and drawing -- each and all in the service of constructing a suitable place for now, in which necessity will not be throttled, and compassion thrive.  This collection is unquestionably the most formally inventive of Hayes's career, yet despite its risk taking -- both playful and serious -- the attention to language never strays and every word is judiciously chosen and placed.  Each piece will be a delight to those who treasure the form.  Sample a poem -- one that coalesces some of the volume's themes --  now, HERE.

The latest poetry collection by the National Book Award-winning MacArthur Fellow, Pittsburgh-based poet, Terrance Hayes features 70 poems sharing the same title, identical with that of the collection itself.  Prepare to be challenged.

Here's an engrossing 214 page collection of essays from one of America's greatest living poets (and one-time CMU and Pitt professor and Pittsburgh resident), Terrance Hayes.  And, worth noting here at Copacetic COmics, this colleciton is filled Hayes's own drawings, diagrams, caricatures and cartoons!

Here's the Penguin Books hype up:

From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak

Canonized, overlooked, and forgotten African American poets star in Terrance Hayes’s brilliant contemplations of personal, canonical, and allegorical literary development. Proceeding from Toni Morrison’s aim to expand the landscape of literary imagination in Playing in the Dark (“I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography”), Watch Your Language charts a lyrical geography of reading and influence in poetry. Illustrated micro-essays, graphic book reviews, biographical prose poems, and nonfiction sketches make reading an imaginative and critical act of watching your language. Hayes has made a kind of poetic guidebook with more questions than answers. “If you don’t see suffering’s potential as art, will it remain suffering?” he asks in one of the lively mock poetry exam questions of this musing, mercurial collection. Hayes’s astonishing drawings and essays literally and figuratively map the acclaimed poet’s routes, roots, and wanderings through the landscape of contemporary poetry.