Reviewed by: How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes Calista McRae (bio) Hayes, Terrance. How to Be Drawn. New York: Penguin, 2015. How to Be Drawn first startles with its title. Not How to Draw, like a step-by-step instructional book, but something that seems more passive, at least at first: how to pose, how to induce or allow others to portray you. A pun hovers: being drawn—being depicted—and being drawn: strained, stretched, or distorted, a little like the tense self-portrait that gazes out from the book’s cover. But struggling against the passive grammar is that How, which implies agency. The miniature conflict between the title’s words imbues the book, which finds much of its energy in unexpected likenesses, differences, and changes. Similes take on lives of their own: “sweat / like glitter that glows like little bits of gold” (8). The word like itself, as verb, adverb, adjective, and speech tag, appears so often as to seem chameleonic. Other commonplace words transform while remaining outwardly the same: “someone is telling me about contranyms, / how ‘cleave’ and ‘cleave’ are the same word / looking in opposite directions” (10). Such metamorphoses suffuse Hayes’s beautifully hard-to-pin-down style. Since his first collection, Muscular Music (1999), his poems have been based in a conversational voice that glides from subject to subject with seeming effortlessness, even breeziness. Matter-of-fact remarks turn into non sequiturs, or fantastical exaggerations; the poems dip from the ordinary, gritty, and realistic to the startlingly imaginative or surreal. Hayes’s syntax is equally fluid: he has perfected both the snappy, concise sentence—”Milquetoast / is not trill, nor is bouillabaisse” (3)—and the meandering, poem-long one (see how clauses delay and pile up in “The Carpenter Ant”). The poems of How to Be Drawn seem fresh not simply because of the range of their imagination, but because Hayes does both ends of the range with equal ease. There is something air-clearing even down to the sans-serif font that he favors. The brisk, relaxed voice of these poems seems utterly un-self-regarding; we get to know and like it through its attention not to itself, but to other things, and especially other people. How to Be Drawn speaks constantly of family: the first twenty-five pages alone sketch an uncle, a grandmother, parents, a brother, a daughter, a grandmother’s uncle. The collection’s second-to-last poem, “How to Draw a Perfect Circle,” takes a troubled, puzzled, multi-angled look at someone initially seen as an anonymous “assailant,” and then as a cousin. At first glance, How to Be Drawn is less verbally exuberant than Hayes’s previous books. In Hip Logic (2002), for example, a poem like “g a n d e r” based its line-endings not in rhyme but in partial anagrams: near, garden, read-, aged, gear, grand, rage, grade, dare, danger, dear (61). Nor does How to Be Drawn do as much with nonce-forms as Lighthead (2010), which introduced “the golden shovel,” where a new poem springs from the end-words of another poet’s work, and the pecha kucha, which was inspired by the rapid slides of business presentations. But although “What It Look Like,” the opening poem of How to Be Drawn, dismisses “the shapes of shapes” because “forms / change” (3), the book is vitally innovative, even in its quieter forms. For example, a number of poems consist of a mixture of two-, three-, and four-line stanzas; this loose form is ideal for Hayes’s kaleidoscopic but careful perceptions. It reinforces a flexibility of angle: that the size or scope of one’s view can be changed at any time, telescoping or contracting from a couplet to something more expansive. The suppleness of the container differs strikingly from the poems in quatrains, such as “The Carpenter Ant” and “Model Prison Model”; both of those depict spaces of [End Page 221] claustrophobia, with palpable confines and edges. And although the forms of How to Be Drawn are relatively restrained, the book also features poems that are much more obviously experimental. “Who Are the Tribes” begins with a half-filled puzzle grid and...