Books

Hayes’s debut collection of poems explores the landscape of an uprooted childhood—a child of immigrants, an immigrant herself—having fled totalitarian Russia in 1978 with her parents and sister. One Strange Country, interrogates displacement and belonging, what it means to grow attached to places as much as to people. This collection takes a reader from a child's understanding of family life in the former U.S.S.R., to an understanding of what it means to come of age, marry, and give birth to children in an adopted country. "An exile's life is planned one day at a time,” Hayes declares in one poem which informs her own experiences, as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and poet. “There is no turning back,” to a childhood —real or imagined — left behind in a native country.

The poet and reader alike, are left “resting in exile—;” one gleans “a sun, at a jumping off point, peaking at noon, yielding to a moon.” One is “unrequited by the sun;” the sun which could be a stand-in for a beloved or a dead father, offering no amnesty from its unrelenting rays. In Ostia Italy, while waiting for a visa to the United States, the poet’s mother teaches the adolescent poet “how to slay a chicken,” a skill more important in life of a budding girl than “reading literature of high Romanticism…in the dark blue of night…by a corded lamp,” like the poet’s mother once did as a girl. Hayes has embraced what Frank Bidart would call her "radical givens," those writerly obsessions that we can't escape.​