Keynote
"Danez Smith's is a voice we need . . . . This is a mighty work and a tremendous offering." (Tracy K. Smith)
Book Title
Don't Call Us Dead
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection
Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartets Prize
Poem Excerpt
history is what it is. it knows what it did.
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
color of a July well spent. but here, not earth
not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts
turned ruby gowns. here, there’s no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
—from “summer, somewhere”
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
color of a July well spent. but here, not earth
not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts
turned ruby gowns. here, there’s no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
—from “summer, somewhere”
Body
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, 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 collection, one that confronts America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.
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About the Author
Credit: Anna Min
Praise
- “[Danez Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. . . . But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech.”—The New Yorker
- “[A] stunning collection. . . . These pieces pulse with the rhythms and assertiveness one expects from poetry slams.”—The Washington Post
- “Smith activates a spectrum of emotions in material that could justifiably remain tragic, bringing pathos and several senses of humor.”—The Nation
- “This will be one of the year’s essential books.”—NPR
