Don't Call Us Dead
Poems
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ISBN10: 1555977855
ISBN13: 9781555977856
Paperback
96 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.99
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.
Reviews
Praise for Don't Call Us Dead
“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 year’s essential books.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
“Don’t Call Us Dead is poet Danez Smith’s ferocious second collection. With humanity and heart, Smith contemplates the assaults on a black, male body in America—police brutality, violence, and AIDS, and the resulting culture of danger, suspicion, grief, psychological pain, and resistance.”—BuzzFeed
“Smith’s work is astonishing, its power is a seething one . . . An essential part of every American’s reading experience.”—Nylon
“Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page . . . Smith can’t help but be breathtaking in style and substance.”—Porochista Khakpour, Virginia Quarterly Review
“Aching and elegiac, these poems bless our world in all its ruin, beg it to be otherwise, and begin the bloody work of writing it anew.”—Literary Hub
“Smith’s book is like poetic rapture . . . Read Don’t Call Us Dead start to finish and if your breath takes a beat, that’s the point: Smith is here to call us out, wake us up, tear us down to what is raw.”—The Millions
“The poet has always been a prophet leading cultural change to the good, and Danez Smith makes a revival of death into song in Don’t Call Us Dead . . . Danez Smith is making a high niche in evolution, by sourcing his life into indelible art.”—Washington Independent Review of Books
“This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies, gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level of craft here is impeccable. Loved this one.”—Roxane Gay
“Danez Smith’s is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity—not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don’t Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering.”—Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars
“Luminous and piercing, this collection reassembles shattering realities into a shimmering and sharp mosaic.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“In this remarkable second collection from Kate Tufts/Lambda Award winner Smith, the content as well as the writing is transcendent.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to ‘those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,’ Smith’s powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle.”—Booklist, starred review