Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems

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.