Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
Categories: Books, Literature & Fiction, Poetry

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection “[Smith&apos;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. Don’t Call Us Dead opens 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, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America—“Dear White America”—where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.


Publisher: Graywolf Press (September 5, 2017)
Publication date: September 5, 2017
Language: English
File size: 2385 KB
Text to Speech: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
X Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Print length: 101 pages