Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

ISBN: 1555977855

Author: Smith, Danez

Condition: New

Finalist for the National Book Award for PoetryWinner 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 YorkerAward-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Dont 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. Dont 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.