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There are books that tantalize because they’re both highly praised and slim. Perhaps you want to read every beloved, award-winning book you can get your hands on but feel time slipping through your fingers along with your ability to read even a few great books each year.
One of the major literary awards categories less visited by the readers I know, including me, is poetry. But once in a while, desperate for the satisfaction of getting through an entire book in a short span of time, I reach for one of the thinnest books on my shelves upon shelves of unread books and find a poetry collection in my hand. Recently, I pulled out a Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
As I pored over the poetry in this collection by one of our great contemporary poets, I found my urgency to reach the end dissipate and my desire to linger over words and meaning take possession.
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
In they’re stunning 2017 collection, Danez Smith explores being Black, being queer, being HIV positive. Heavy subjects for a heavy world concentrated into spare, potent lines. Not every kind of poetry works for everyone and I can’t always scry meaning from the lines the way I imagine great students of the form might but, as with Tracy K. Smith’s collection, Life on Mars, I got the sense that I was learning more about the author, identity, and the hard questions of life every time I re-read a poem.
In “dear white america” Smith calls white Americans out for the enduring and penetrating racism in this country, from violence against Black people to professing color-blindness while upholding racism and the ideals of white supremacy. The normalization of harmful white supremacist beauty standards and racism disguised as personal preference, for instance, emerges in “a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men’s mouth” followed by the poem “& even the black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys.” Smith tells a cohesive and personal story about the commonplace and epic struggles of being on intimate terms with death and mortality, both as someone who is HIV-positive and someone encountering the nonstop violence against their community.
There is as much beauty and wonder as pain to find in these pages, and you’ll want to spend as much time as you can peeling back the many layers of these poems.
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