Danez Smith

The highly anticipated second collection by Danez Smith—“Hallelujah is an understatement” (Patricia Smith) 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.

Poems

Don't Call Us Dead

Danez Smith is our president Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia, and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family—blood and chosen—arrives with just the right food and some redemption. Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez’s friends and for you and for yours.

Homie

Poetry. African American Studies. These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make "a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children/ smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol." That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."

Black Movie

[insert] boy

Bluff

Poetry. LGBT Studies. African American Studies. Winner, Lambda Literary Award, Gay Poetry 2015. Chosen by Don Share for Boston Globe's Best Poetry Books, 2014. 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America. "The poems of [INSERT] BOY have need of the body—desire it and lament its mortality—but over and again they assert Smith's seemingly religious belief that every sound the body makes, every word and wail, is only possible through connection to some other plane of existence. This is a lovely, voice-driven book, singing high notes sharp as a switchblade."—Jericho Brown "Danez Smith lays down the gauntlet for all of us to speak our deepest truths with more elegance, more ferocity, and almost more beauty than a reader can bear."—Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Insert Boy

Dunya Mikhail

Jericho Brown

Ilya Kaminsky

Tiffany Midge

Rajiv Mohabir

Tanaya Winder

Lawrence Matsuda

Gary Copeland Lilley

Anna Balint

Thomas Hubbard

Shankar Narayan

Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, edited by Seattle-based writers Anna Balint, Phoebe Bosche, and Thomas Hubbard, contains poems, stories and images from 117 writers and 53 artists, divided into five fluid and intersecting sections: Legacies, We Are Here, Why?, Evidence, and Resistance. We begin with Legacies because the current increased climate of hate in this country didn't begin with the 2016 election, and to find its roots we must look to U.S. history. Take a Stand, Art Against Hate Anthology comes at a critical time in our nation's cultural discourse surrounding intersections of identity, resistance, and looking at the past to forge a path forward. This collection spans form, tone, and theme without feeling cluttered; you find yourself reading something new while experiencing the same emotions many of us have come to find all too familiar. Thought-provoking and heart-wrenching, this collection flows seamlessly from poetry to visual art, creating an anthology that is not only a commanding and introspective read, but a necessary one. We can regard Take a Stand: Art Against Hate as a print-form peace march, an ongoing campaign for justice for all of the struggles embodied in these writings and depicted in the photos and artwork included here. This is a deeply democratic anthology-standing alongside nationally prominent voices such as Jericho Brown, Lucille Clifton, Tess Gallagher, Ilya Kaminsky, Dunya Mikhail, Marge Piercy and Danez Smith, are luminaries renowned in this region and beyond, such as Kathleen Alcalá, Gary Copeland Lilley, Claudia Castro Luna, Melissa Kwasny, Priscilla Long, Tiffany Midge, and Gail Tremblay.

A Raven Chronicles Anthology

Take a Stand, Art Against Hate

Danez Smith

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