Don't Call Us Dead

Summary

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry  Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection  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.

©2017 Danez Smith (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books