C Minor
1Still hunting requires patience, quiet, and,above all else, prey. How long is the rule ofdeath? How long is a moment? Time still huntsus, does it not? In this stew of motion.2As if by some whistle signal they let us in,Let us hang around like possible members ordefinite victims. A reminiscence must be,necessarily, as long as the event remembered.3Conjure and construct, you told mewhile we waited in our blind, laughed whenwe imagined a blind that affordedno sight of our prey, fleeting at best,shifting, pushing, crawling, spiraling intoview, into range, into focus, then gone.
Feature Date
- September 10, 2024
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“C Minor” is from Sonnets for a Missing Key by Percival Everett (Red Hen Press 2024). Used with permission from the publisher.
Michael Avedon
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
“Your favorite writer’s writer, Percival Everett, is now everyone’s fave thanks to American Fiction, the Oscar-nominated film adaptation of his book Erasure. His latest, a lyrical book of must-read sonnets, remixes Chopin and Tatum in startling, elegiac new shapes.”
—Ryan Coleman, Entertainment Weekly
“I feel very deeply that he is one of the most profoundly talented writers of all time.”
—Robin Coste Lewis, author of Voyage of the Sable Venus and National Book Award for Poetry Winner
“Percival Everett’s body of work has been called many things—experimental, idiosyncratic, ‘gleefully unhinged’—and perhaps most frequently, prolific.”
—Lisa Tolin, Editorial Director at PEN America
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