Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

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. 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.

Author: Danez Smith
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 09/05/2017
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.4lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.50w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781555977856


Award: National Book Awards - Finalist