National Network for Equitable Library Service

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry — Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection. "[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy." — The New Yorker. 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.