Don't Call US Dead
Poems
Graywolf · Print & ebook · September 5, 2017
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.
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- Who it’s for
- These poems hold grief, desire, mortality, and sudden joy in the same charged space.
- Themes
- Police violence and Black grief, Desire and mortality, HIV and bodily vulnerability
- Genres
- African American Poetry, LGBTQ+ Poetry, Political & Protest Poetry
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Start with this bookAbout this book
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.
Continue reading
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.
Lyric Under Pressure
These poems hold grief, desire, mortality, and sudden joy in the same charged space.
Come here for
- Poetry confronting racial violence and its afterlives
- A voice moving between rebuke, praise, and tenderness
Expect
- Urgent lyrics with performative force
- A collection that makes room for grief and joy
Where it sits
| LGBTQ+ Poetry | 85% |
|---|---|
| African American Poetry | 82% |
| Political & Protest Poetry | 70% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- American Poetry
- African American Poetry
- LGBTQ+ Poetry
- Authors
- Danez Smith
- Publisher
- Graywolf
- Published
- September 5, 2017
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Theme
- Police violence and Black grief · Desire and mortality · HIV and bodily vulnerability
- Reading lane
- American Poetry