Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry 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 & 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 & grief are forgotten & replaced with the safety love & longevity they deserved here on earth Smith turns then to desire mortality
- the dangers experienced in skin & body & blood
- & 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 & ambitious collection one that confronts praises & rebukes an America where every day is too often a funeral & not often enough a miracle