Wear Your Wig

For Hayes, this is characteristic fun: he is known for his high-low reference-dropping, his prankish renditions of African American icons (Sir Duke, meet Dirt McGirt), and his sleight of syntax-imagine the kick he got out of superimposing Moore's "it" (poetry) onto ODB's "it" (you know, "it"). Nominally a riffon Ellen Gallagher's DeLuxe-itself a portfolio of riffs, sixty nutty pastiches of magazine ads, targeted at African American consumers, for beauty and haircare products -"Wigphrastic" is effectively a primer on performing race and gender, terse as an encyclopedia entry but incomparably more fun to read out loud: "A lady places her bow about-face to place her face in place. / Which is a placebo of place, her face is a placebo!" Wigs, like identities, can be "a form of camouflage," or a draftat self-revision-take "Louis XIV small and bald / as a boiled egg making himself taller by means / of a towering hairpiece resembling a Corinthian column." The wig closet that Hayes finds behind each of us is a convenient emblem for his own poetry, which sports traditional forms at askew angles-sonnets, slant-rhymed couplets, self-one-upping lists-as well as new genres of contemporary existence-the grant letter, the diss track, the Q&A. The boldest experiments in How to Be Drawn flaunt Excel-spreadsheet formatting, emoji, and titles upon subtitles upon subsubtitles daring us to reduce these poems to elevator pitches ("Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report") or superficial subjects ("New Jersey Poem"). Other poems ventriloquize victimizers: in "Gentle Measures," Hayes inverts a favorite theme, fatherlessness, by playing absent father to a United Nations of children: "I would like to have with 196 women from the world's / 196 nations 196 children, then I would like to abandon them. / I know it's not that easy." [...]in the alarmingly matter-off-act "Antebellum House Party," Hayes speaks through unspeakable atrocity, compiling a slave owner's how-to in dehumanization: "To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable / Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts / Axed and worked to confidence."