Very much worthy of the recognition it has received, including this year's National Book Award. Hayes' poetry is what we most hope for in the art: a natural attention to language that manifests equally in the sound and the sense of it. The auricular pleasures are both audible and subtle: "The bride of eaves or the easy bride of naves."

In one poem, Hayes plaits the old story of the four blind men trying to describe the elephant with meditations on the body and boundaries. In another, he uses Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" to provide end-words for his lines. Though there's a pure pleasure to Hayes' inventiveness, there's also immeasurable gravitas in how that knack for invention illuminates the larger world of the collection.