Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

by Danez Smith

96 pages

English language

Published Sept. 5, 2017 by Graywolf Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-55597-785-6
OCLC Number:: 965740795

(13 reviews)

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.

6 editions

meeg reviewed Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith

Review of "Don't Call Us Dead: Poems" on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I devoured this book of poetry. Smith writes so honestly and painfully about the intersections of being black, queer, poz, (and the trauma that follows all three) AND trying to make some kind of sense in living in a country where police murder people of color and face no consequences (and the trauma that follows that as well). I cannot recommend this book enough, and I look forward to reading more of Smith's work.