Don't Call Us Dead: Poems
Don't Call Us Dead begins by imagining a place where Black boys are freed from violence, then turns police brutality, anti-Blackness, queerness, HIV, the body, and death into poetry. Anger and mourning are joined by humor, prayer, and a fierce desire for life.
Work Information
A collection that renames those called dead as alive somewhere else.
Danez Smith's second collection centers on violence against Black queer bodies and on the imagination that calls life back from that violence. The opening sequence envisions safety and love for boys who have been shot, while later poems move through desire, illness, and critique of America. The Graywolf Press edition was confirmed; no Japanese edition was found.
Review Summaries
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The collection is praised for joining the energy of performance with the density of written poetry. Even with grave subjects, sudden joy and intimacy rise from the poems, leaving a powerful bodily afterimage.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Graywolf Pr
- Published
- 2017-09-05
- Pages
- 88 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.79 x 0.79 x 22.84 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781555977856
- ISBN-10
- 1555977855
- Price
- 3070 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
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.
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy , winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Poetry Foundation, and lives in Minneapolis.
Reviews
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Danez é um Shakespeare moderno. Maravilhoso.Os assuntos são tratados aqui com muita abertura e sinceridade. Vale o tempo e a leitura.
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I bought it as a surprise present for a young, black poet (my kid sister), and she LOVED it. It also came a few days early which was great.
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Brilliant writing with new form of poetry. Perfectly reflects the dark conscience of society. Good read for any avid reader.
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These poems embrace topics that most avoid discussing around dinner tables or campfires because it makes them uncomfortable. Hard hitting and intense, Danez Smith's "Don't Call Us Dead" is all about police brutality, America, gay men, sex, life and death, and HIV. Here, he creates a world where blacks can live again with no fear, no pain or suffering. The very first poem of the book starts us off with that. For example, Smith says, "Theres no language for officer or law" and "we go out for sweets and come back." That being said, Smith talks about politics, but it isn't a tiring political debate. The reader knows exactly where they stand with their views, but his rhetoric isn’t hateful(although it may come across that way to readers looking from the outside in. Smith shares their opinion about our president without using his name and says he's a man who has "no words / & hair beyond simile." He talks about gun violence and does a poem partly in the POV of a policemen. For example it starts with, "dear ghost I made/I was raised with a healthy fear of the dark" and continues with "I got sca... I was just doing my job." Later, the same poem is the point of view of a black man. Smith shares his opinion and experience on being a man who's HIV positive, but also mixes that topic with others like gun violence and politics within the same breath. Examples: "some of us are killed / in pieces, some of us all at once” and “do you think someone created AIDS? / maybe. i don't doubt that / anything is possible in a place / where you can burn a body / with less outrage than a flag.” Smith is even informative. They gives readers a statistic from the CDC that states 1 in 2 black men who have gay sex will get HIV. Insanity! The subject matter often intertwines with the motif: Nature. The running theme for this author is nature. They are often comparing things to forests, roots, skies, oceans, dirt ect. Smith's imagery is powerful. For example, the lines "how your blood / smells like a hospital, graveyard / or morgue left in the sun" made my nose wrinkle and my lip curl in disgust. Smith's vocabulary is kept simple for the most part. There isn’t big fancy words thrown in just to make the poems seem intelligent, pretty or fancy. No need to run and scramble to Google search a word. The poem isn’t pretty because the topics aren't pretty. The choice of making all “I's" lower case is an interesting choice. That speaks volumes in itself about how the author may feel. The author plays with line spacing quite a bit. Their line breaks make sense and leave the reader often surprised at what comes next or in suspense as their eyes scurry to get to the next line. The most experimentation and line spacing would be pages 51 and 52 with the mixing of phrases of "my blood" and "his blood." It also breaks up the monotony of line reading and just gives the readers a picture to observe. Overall, it’s great. Not to be read in a single sitting, but meant to be taken in, digested and then reread for more information. The book isn't all doom and gloom, there are poems that have happier notes. This book is good for people who are just getting into poetry because its modern, it taps into things that can be understood by recent /current generations.
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Incredible. Beautiful. Painful. Breath-taking. Heart -breaking. Poetry has to be really something special and evoke very strong feelings and images for me to have a positive reaction to it - and the impact made by Danez Smith in this collection was intense. I'm left feeling somewhat masochistic in a sense....in that I could compare my emotional state on finishing reading this book as similar to feeling grateful for being run over by a truck. I'm shaken and I'm tearful, yet I'm now looking for earlier work to buy and then returning to the beginning of 'Don't Call Us Dead' in order to go through again - aloud, to anyone who will listen.