Don'T Call Us Dead Av Danez (Author) Smith

<p><b>*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018*</b><br><b>*A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017*</b><br><br><b>*A <i>Financial Times</i> and <i>Telegraph</i> Book of the Year 2018*<br><br>‘[Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy’ <i>The New Yorker </i><br><br></b>Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a ground-breaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. <i>Don’t Call Us Dead</i> 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 an HIV-positive diagnosis. <br><br>‘Some of us are killed / in pieces,’ Smith writes, ‘some of us all at once.’ <i>Don’t Call Us Dead</i> is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.</p>