*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018*
*A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017*
*A Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2018*
'[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 ground-breaking 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 an HIV-positive diagnosis.
'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 an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
Industry Reviews
"Haunting ... This material is necessarily bleak, but Smith's mercurial invention means it's never merely grim ... The visionary 23-page opener, "summer, somewhere" [...] is something truly remarkable; a song from a sunlit afterlife, an "unpopular heaven" for black boys killed young, all delivered in taut couplets ...Memorable, moving and imbued with moral purpose. I read and re-read this collection (particularly its opening poem) over several weeks... "summer, somewhere" is, by any measure, a brilliant poem"
