Don't Call Us Dead: Poems [Paperback]

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power.Dont Call Us Deadopens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortalitythe dangers experienced in skin and body and bloodand a diagnosis of HIV positive. Some of us are killed / in pieces, Smith writes, some of us all at once.Dont Call Us Deadis an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes AmericaDear White Americawhere every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

These poems cant make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smiths work is about that imaginationits role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. . . . Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.The New Yorker

Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to strain. . . . This will be one of the years essential books.lR