‘[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
‘Smith’s powerful new poetry collection settles into your skin … sticking and rooting itself, so that it’s soon a part of you. Smith’s work is astonishing, its power is a seething one … An essential part of every American’s reading experience.’ —Nylon
‘With humanity and heart, Smith contemplates the assaults on a black, male body in America – police brutality, violence, and AIDS, and the resulting culture of danger, suspicion, grief, psychological pain, and resistance.’ —BuzzFeed
‘Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page … Smith can’t help but be breathtaking in style and substance.’ —Porochista Khakpour, Virginia Quarterly Review
‘Smith’s book is like poetic rapture …. Read Don’t Call Us Dead start to finish and if your breath takes a beat, that’s the point: Smith is here to call us out, wake us up, tear us down to what is raw.’ —The Millions
‘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, starred review
[insert] boy
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473549173
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Danez Smith 2017
Cover photograph © Shikeith, The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it
Danez Smith has asserted the right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in 2018
First published in the US by Graywolf Press in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
for Pookie
my day one & best love
Oh my God, oh my God
If I die, I’m a legend
Drake
he who wore death discourages any plague
Sonia Sanchez
somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown
as rye play the dozens & ball, jump
in the air & stay there. boys become new
moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise
-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least
spit back a father or two. i won’t get started.
history is what it is. it knows what it did.
bad dog. bad blood. bad day to be a boy
color of a July well spent. but here, not earth
not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts
turned ruby gowns. here, there’s no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray.
we go out for sweets & come back.
//
this is how we are born: come morning
after we cypher/feast/hoop, we dig
a new one from the ground, take
him out his treebox, shake worms
from his braids. sometimes they’ll sing
a trapgod hymn (what a first breath!)
sometimes it’s they eyes who lead
scanning for bonefleshed men in blue.
we say congrats, you’re a boy again!
we give him a durag, a bowl, a second chance.
we send him off to wander for a day
or ever, let him pick his new name.
that boy was Trayvon, now called RainKing.
that man Sean named himself i do, i do.
O, the imagination of a new reborn boy
but most of us settle on alive.
//
sometimes a boy is born
right out the sky, dropped from
a bridge between starshine & clay.
one boy showed up pulled behind
a truck, a parade for himself
& his wet red train. years ago
we plucked brothers from branches
peeled their naps from bark.
sometimes a boy walks into his room
then walks out into his new world
still clutching wicked metals. some boys
waded here through their own blood.
does it matter how he got here if we’re all here
to dance? grab a boy! spin him around!
if he asks for a kiss, kiss him.
if he asks where he is, say gone.
//
dear air where you used to be, dear empty Chucks
by front door, dear whatever you are now, dear son
they buried you all business, no ceremony.
cameras, t-shirts, essays, protests