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.
