Point of View

Much of the collection utilizes the first person point of view. The rare exceptions to this are poems such as “Fish Head for Katrina,” which completely omits the first person singular pronoun and is told in the third person, or “The Mustache,” which also omits the first person singular but at times addresses an unidentified second person. Other than these few examples however, most of the book is spent shifting between various different first person point of view speakers. Nearly all of these poems are implicitly told from the perspective of African American men, like Hayes himself. However, while some of these speakers may identify closely with the poet, others, specifically the poems like “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “Anchorhead,” and “Ghazal-Head” are told from the perspective of much more mythlike characters whose identities can only be gleaned through their voices and the subject...