Touched

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I trust Luther Hughes with the body. In Touched, Hughes is careful with it, he handles the body as deliberate and tender as one would a poem. The bodies here, be they black, queer, animal, living, or recovering, are given an authority only possible in poems, and only executed right in the handles of a capable poem. Hughes is more than capable though. Here is the first announcement of a bad one, y'all. And I mean black people bad. Good bad. Bad bad. When you reached the bladder, / there was God. Yep. Hughes said that. I didn’t know I was waiting on someone to say all these things until I opened them up and lived them. And it took living to make these poems. And it is our pleasure to live in them now. Touched is only one thing this book will leave you. Let it leave you these ways also: awed, floored, stunned, healed, shaken, still, better, clean, ready to read it again.

• Danez Smith