To Float in the Space Between

Reviews / Votes

"National Book Award-winning poet Hayes plunges into creative nonfiction with this book about another poet, Etheridge Knight, cautioning readers that 'this is not a biography.' Throughout, Hayes challenges genre constraints, bringing together personal reflections, drawings, and poems by Knight and himself, and constructing a work that is part speculative biography, part autobiography, and part critical essay. . . . 'How does someone become a poet?' In this wonderfully lyrical text, Hayes suggests it isn't in the details of an individual's life, but through a hard-to-trace yet vital network of influences."
-Publishers Weekly "There are no heroes to be found here but there are plenty of poets. There's also an abundance of evidence regarding what makes a poet a poet. Not surprisingly the best instances transcend far beyond anything possibly offered in a classroom setting. Hayes has written a book in its best parts about the larger realm of living... and, for the most part, he does so with the self-scrutiny necessary to bring those lessons to bear on his own work. For there is no work without the life which both informs and is informed by it."
Patrick James Dunagan, Entropy "Poets are people who promise to continue responding to what is actual. The poet's first poems comprise the promise. As time passes, one admires the continuation as much as the poems. This is why a young poet may be inspired simply by watching his mentor put on her coat and walk out the classroom door: she is in motion, heading towards the world of her materials, as she vowed to do years ago. The motion is the influence, the air stirred in the space between teacher and ephebe . . . In To Float In The Space Between, Terrance Hayes serves up a creative meditation on Influence.
-On the Seawall "Partly, this is a critical biography of the black poet Etheridge knight: how he came to be the poet and man he was, who did he influence and who was he influenced by. But it's also a critical biography of Hayes himself. . . . In looking at Hayes looking at Knight, we see both figures, and the history of black poetics, more clearly."
Anthony Domestico, Commonweal "To Float in the Space Between is simply amazing. It's an investigation of Hayes's family tree, a time-lapse of one poet's bloom, and an homage to the seed(s) that started it all."
Cody Lee, NewPages "As is the case throughout Hayes's work, To Float in the Space Between is a meditation on family; from the first, Hayes has fingered the grain of black families, whether linked by blood or duty or sexual tension or aesthetic kinship. To Float movingly bridges these concerns. . . . The 19 sections in Hayes's book take their titles and focus from phrases in Knight's most celebrated poem, 'The Idea of Ancestry.' Thus this collection offers a deep textural (as opposed to textual) encounter between two important and mercurial minds."
Ed Pavlic, The New York Times