American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Written fast, in the first 200 days of the Trump presidency, the book's headlong pace shows in places. One critic notes individual sonnets within a section sometimes read weaker, seemingly included just to round each section out to its fixed count of 14 rather than because the poem earned its place, and singles out a line about a wound requiring heroic healing as pure cliche. A sharper worry comes from a reviewer who suspects the book's audience is mostly readers already sympathetic to its politics, “the (secular) choir,” rather than anyone it might change the mind of. The project is framed modestly, “one man writing a letter to show his humanity,” insisting along the way that “these killings are in fact political,” a claim some readers will find undersells the book's reach and others will find exactly right.