The highly anticipated collection by Danez Smith- 'One of the year's essential books' NPR
Danez Smith's debut poetry collection, insert boy, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and has published poems in Granta, Poetry and The Best American Poetry. Smith lives in Minneapolis.
This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and
fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies,
gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV
positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level
of craft here is impeccable
*Roxane Gay*
Tremendously moving, an exalting and longed-for acknowledgement of
historical pain ... Smith’s ability to look death squarely in the
eye and seize from it language that is fertile with myth, beauty
and intellect is astonishing
*The Guardian*
A powerful and moving read. Smith pays tribute to the young black
men America has lost to police shootings, racism and injustice, and
writes disarmingly about life and sex with HIV, all in a restless
verse
*Financial Times, **Books of the Year***
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
*The Telegraph, Poetry book of the month*
[Danez Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but
they pay out, often, in sudden joy… they also know the magic trick
of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic
speech. And they are, in their cadences and management of lines,
deeply literary. I hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest
who jury-rigged his verse to express personal turmoil, and Hart
Crane, whose gentleness was expressed in an American idiom full of
thunderclap, and Allen Ginsberg, who loved and learned from them
both. The addition of Smith’s star turns a random cluster of points
into a constellation, the way new work of this calibre always does…
In this moving, unsettling work, the question is not simply one of
craft. It’s about how the body and its authority can be manifested
in writing, with only the spindly trace of letters to stand in for
it
*The New Yorker*
Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a
formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to
strain... This will be one of the year's essential books
*NPR, 2017 Poetry Preview*
Danez Smith's is a voice we need now more than ever as living,
feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend
beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity—not despite the
realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us
to make of and do to one another. Don't Call Us Dead gives me a
dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by.
This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering
*Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars*
Danez Smith is a poet of exceptional linguistic exuberance, style
and grace
*Kayo Chingonyi, author of Kumukanda*
[An] achingly gorgeous poetry collection by the brilliant Danez
Smith ... There is a hope here, pleas and prayers; these poems
pierce and they burn, they work as incantations, they lift you up,
but refuse to settle you back down. They are miraculous, sublime;
if you do one thing for yourself this summer, let it be to read
this book, and linger over each and every word
*Nylon*
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its
humanity, and its urgency. Don’t Call Us Dead is an historical
commentary, a scientific document, a personal narrative, and a
formal poetics. Smith uses every tool of craft at a poet’s disposal
to deliver powerful, urgent, deliberate, crucial poems. Don’t miss
this book
*The Rumpus*
Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page . . .
Smith can’t help but be breathtaking in style and substance
*Virginia Quarterly Review*
Where the stakes of living are high, Danez Smith puts their body
right on the front line—‘i survived yesterday,’ they write, ‘spent
it ducking bullets.’ In an America that conspires against black,
brown, queer, and trans bodies, Danez writes poems of insistence
and resistance; they anticipate a better world for all of us ‘where
everything is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.’
*D. A. Powell*
Smith transcends elegy in this intimate, humorous, and biting
collection in which he writes of desire, mortality, white
supremacy, and more
*Publishers Weekly*
Danez Smith is an original – that rare blend between raw blinding
light, an instinct for the well aright line, the courage to walk
into his own love and pain armed only with the fragile hope of
words, and a fire so unique it’s all his own. In Don’t Call Us Dead
he demands we stand only in the truth of our own fear and build a
love that’s so redemptive and real. If you have ever lost faith, if
you want to believe in life, then you must read this book – it will
humble and uplift you, leave you understanding that in the face of
it all, there is only awe
*Chris Abani*
Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to ‘those brown folks
who make / up the nation of my heart,’ Smith’s powerhouse
collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd
nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross. Incandescent,
indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle
*Booklist*
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