February POtM - Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Title: Don’t Call Us Dead
Author: Danez Smith
Published: 2017
Rating: ★★★★★
here, there’s no language for officer or law, no color to call white. if snow fell, it’d be black. please, don’t call us dead, call us alive someplace better.
As stated in my February Wrap-Up, I honored Black History Month by reading exclusively black authors. This book was a re-read for me, and it is so necessary to pin it as this month’s noted poetry collection!
Don’t Call Us Dead is an homage to the black body— particularly what happens after death. Danez writes poems about an imagined afterlife of police-murdered men, and in tandem writes of the HIV epidemic and what kind of battle this presents for a body as well.
I love this collection not only for its subject matter, but also because of its experimentation with form. Smith is so clearly skilled in his craft, using so many intricacies of the poetic form to convey his ideas. Smith features sonnet crowns and experiments with punctuation. Additionally, he uses concrete imagery wherein the text takes up more and more of a page until the pages are just ink. Each piece is not only a testimony to the Black experience in America, but is also a testimony to poetry as an art.
I fell in love with Smith’s spoken-word poems first (check out my favorite of his here). Then, I was introduced to his book in a graduate-level poetry course. Much of the reason I fell so quickly in love with this work was that Smith conveys his own experiences, a life through his own small lens, while also conveying it through the lens of the broader Black American experience.
I strongly, strongly recommend this work to anyone who is craving a new experience; with poetry, with the world, or with both.
