Danez Smith is a unique poet. They are Black, queer, non-binary, and HIV-positive. We honour them with this selection of their work and hope you will explore their writings further.
The collection Don’t Call Us Dead was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2017. As Smith describes it, the book “confronts, praises, and rebukes America,” and addresses the violence perpetrated against Black and queer bodies. Ultimately, Smith finds joy through their strikingly beautiful command of poetic language, cycling between couplets, prose poems, and free verse for an array of emotional effects. This approach exhausts what Smith critiques and breathes new life into what they celebrate, addressing history in its totality.
We have selected summer, somewhere, which opens the book. This long poem imagines an afterlife for murdered Black boys. Our reality seeps into this afterlife through artifacts of the boys’ memories, yet they have escaped. The final poem is a mere 16 lines of rhythmically hypnotic lyrics, as the speaker sings to the Atlantic Ocean to return the bodies lost in the Middle Passage.
The first selected poem, The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar, tells the story of a young person’s first time in a gay bar and the liberation they feel. Although they are not yet of age, they manage to get in with a fake ID, the bouncer knowing they needed this experience. It is a poem of liberation, coming together in a space of queer identities and finally feeling seen. Though written as one stanza, Smith uses spacing to define two different settings within the poem: the first half focuses on entry and the bar, and the second on the dance floor. Smith varies their use of enjambment and caesura to create a disrupted poetic meter. The poem is written in free verse, the lack of consistent poetic form reflecting Smith’s personal liberation.
The third poem, alternate names for black boys, defies analysis and interpretation. It is purely contemporary, socially-involved activist poetry. As Marcus Wicker best describes it: “These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make ‘dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.'”
Smith is a brilliant poet with a fresh contemporary style, offering a remarkable twinned, double-forking spiral of youthful abandon and its mirror-awareness.
(A selection by Răzvan Ion.)
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The 17-Year-Old & the Gay Bar
By Danez Smith
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From “summer, somewhere”
By Danez Smith
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alternate names for black boys
By Danez Smith
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