Don't Call Us Dead

<p><strong>*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018*</strong><br /><strong>*A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017*</strong></p> <p><strong>*A <em>Financial Times</em> and <em>Telegraph</em> Book of the Year 2018*</strong></p> <p><strong>'[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy' - <em>The New Yorker</em></strong></p> <p>Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a ground-breaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. <em>Don't Call Us Dead</em> 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 &ndash; the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood &ndash; and an HIV-positive diagnosis.</p> <p>'Some of us are killed / in pieces,' Smith writes, 'some of us all at once.' <em>Don't Call Us Dead</em> 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>