“I live in music. It is where my poems begin,” said Terrance Hayes of his 2010 #NBAward-Winning #Poetry collection Lighthead. Jan Jelinek, Marvin Gaye, Fine Young Cannibals, Madlib, and even Orpheus, the mythic son of the Greek God Apollo, lend their artistic invention to Hayes’s daring rewiring of poetic form. On our blog dedicated to #NBAPoets, poet and critic Katie Peterson observes that Hayes’s “intense, unpredictable voice” pulls together these wide-ranging influences to pursue pressing concerns of a life lived, as Hayes writes, “out on a limb” and as well as how to survive when you’re “carrying the whimper/you can hear when the mouth is collapsed?” Hayes’s answer, Peterson writes, “is a poet’s answer: you fall in love with a word, you create a myth of heroism, you keep singing.” #NBAPoets #NBAwards #NationalPoetryMonth