Terrance Hayes's first book of poetry, Muscular Music, has already gained considerable acclaim as an authentic voice of the African American experience. A book which runs the gamut of images from jazz, to Fat Albert, to Andrew Carnegie and Dante, Muscular Music is "an original, provocative read," according to Black Issues Book Review critics Duriel E. Harris and Kelly Ellis. The reviewers wrote that "Terrance Hayes displays a delicate yet broad-shouldered attentiveness, revealing the interior textures and melodies of a thoughtfully evolving black male self."

Hayes grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, where he was an accomplished athlete as well as a creative writer and artist. According to his former high school principal, quoted in a story in the Columbia State, "He's so cultured and refined. . . . You see a basketball player and think he's rough and tough. But it's not always like that." Hayes confessed in the State story that few of his peers at that stage of his life knew that he wrote poetry. After earning degrees in English and fine arts, he found a small publisher for his poetry and was surprised when the first printing rapidly disappeared. He said that combining a busy teaching career at Xavier University of New Orleans with writing is not so difficult: "I was told a while back that if you want to be a poet, you'll write. You'll find the time it takes. It's like eating. You always find the time to eat when you're hungry. I'll make the time."

Hayes's book dwells on music and particularly on the idea that our cultural identities are bound up with the sounds we make. The "muscularity" of the poetic language he creates is a key to a better understanding of African-American identity. His poems are full of references to the dominant white popular culture and the way it impacts upon African Americans. For example, he opens the poem "What I Am" with the following lines: "Fred Sanford's on at 12 / &I'm standing in the express lane (cash only) / about to buy Head and Shoulders / the white people shampoo, no one knows / what I am. My name could be Lamont. / George Clinton wears colors like Toucan Sam, / the Froot Loop pelican. Follow your nose, / he says. But I have no nose, no mouth, . . ."

Sometimes Hayes uses well-known African-American artists such as Marvin Gaye or Roberta Flack to address societal issues. Adrian Harris, in the Crab Orchard Review, commented that "Hayes uses music to depict aspects of African-American culture through aspects of the culture itself, rather than as it is defined by American society."

Reviewers generally agreed that Muscular Music lends a unique element to the stream of American poetry. Although Tyrone Williams in African American Review felt that many of Hayes's poems were not any better than those of his contemporaries, he noted that "Hayes achieves a modest lyric intensity" when "the pathos of the supermarket ad competes with asides on mathematics, politics, slavery, and poetry," as in these lines from "Buy One, Get One": "In the 10th grade I knew briefly numbers to be the Grand / Daddies of the Cosmos. Pythagoras & Plato, knew it too--/ MATH: realm of the Real & Infinite Truth. Each old man / was right to scorn poets for their noise about Death / & personal Beauty. Anyone will tell you, Poetry / is beautiful, but it ain't no super Model."

According to Harris and Ellis, Hayes's poetic persona is "quirky and likeable, a palatable version of black masculinity unavoidably juxtaposed with contemporary media images of gun-toting, boisterous, endangered black male predators." These reviewers also complimented Hayes for his "skillful manipulation of conventional forms from couplets to prose poems."

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