Tara McEvoy, 25, is a PhD student and editor of the Tangerine, a magazine of new writing. Her work has been published in Vogue, the Irish Times and the Wire. She lives in Belfast. Her piece “confidently navigates challenging material”, and, most importantly, sent the judges “back to the poems.”

James Baldwin described the predicament like this: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” Terrance Hayes’s latest collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, makes visible the outlines of the trap of history by pushing against the constraints of the 14-line sonnet form. The result is a book that speaks with urgency and authority, bearing witness to the absurdities and cruelties of the present moment.

Hayes began writing this, his seventh collection, in response to Donald Trump’s presidential election, and several of the poems here indirectly address the politician. He becomes “Mister Trumpet”; the speaker of one sonnet asks, “Are you not the colour of this country’s current threat/ Advisory?”

But in refusing to name Trump, even as he ghosts the collection, Hayes refuses to minimise the gravity of the political crises we face by pinning them to any one figure. America’s problems go deeper: “Something happens everywhere in this country/ Every day. Someone is praying, someone is prey.” “It’s not the bad people who are brave/ I fear,” writes Hayes, “it’s the good people who are afraid”, but he also troubles this distinction. Who is “good” and who is “bad” when:

Even the most kindhearted white woman,
Dragging herself through the traffic with her nails
On the wheel & her head in a chamber of black
Modern American music may begin, almost
Carelessly, to breathe n-words.

Like Claudia Rankine’s collection Citizen, Hayes’s book forms a sustained meditation on what it is to be black and living in America. The collection might be ambitious, but it succeeds in that ambition, as both an archaeology and an ethnography of the US.

Each poem in the collection has the same title, simply American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, in homage to Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets sequence of the 1990s. But Hayes reinvigorates the form. For a collection in which death is everywhere present – “the names alive are like names in the graves”, runs one refrain – thrills with a rapid pulse. The sonnet is “part prison,/ Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame”. It is both cell and sanctuary, and this dichotomy is borne out through the book as a whole: it is part political treatise, part love letter to Hayes’s friends and family, and, importantly, to his predecessors.

The first poem marks an attempt to fashion a canon of sorts:

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & Windows.

These “weirdos & worriers” include Baldwin, a presiding spirit of the collection (“Seven of the ten things I love in the face/ Of James Baldwin concern the spiritual/ Elasticity of his expressions”, Hayes tells us), Emily Dickinson, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. As in the songs of Davis and Coltrane, there is an improvisational quality to the mellifluous, meandering lyrics in this book – to the movement between caress and sucker punch – that belies Hayes’s mastery of the craft. Take these lines as evidence of his delight in the raw stuff of language, from a poem that continues in a vein of lexical playfulness: “The umpteenth thump on the rump of a badunkadunk/ Stumps us. The lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder.”

The book doesn’t just combine style and substance; style becomes substance. An incantatory effect develops, motifs recur and proliferate, images are revised and given new depth. An early poem contains a throwaway reference to a fictional species from the TV series Doctor Who (“I’m a Time Lord. My armour is flesh/ And spirit. I carry a flag bearing/ A different nation on each side”), but as we near the end of the book, the character acquires a profound new meaning: “A brother has to know how to time travel & doctor/ Himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck.”

And what of the titular assassin? They, too, are a time traveller, a shape-shifter, an infrequent addressee of these poems; popping up in both the past and the future, a stand-in for the threat that polices black bodies. But these sonnets – the force of their commemorations and celebrations – give their speakers power. As one poem ends: “You assassinate my lovely legs & the muscular hook of my cock./ Still, I speak for the dead. You will never assassinate my ghosts.” These poems reminded me what poetry is capable of: of being revelatory and inscrutable all at once, of speaking truth to power – but speaking it slant.

• Read the rest of this year’s shortlisted entries in the Observer/Anthony Burgess prize