Don't call us dead: poems - Danez Smith

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.