Don’t Call Us Dead - Danez Smith

Category: Adults, LGBT, Poetry
Language: English
Keywords: African American Race

Written by Danez Smith
Read by Danez Smith
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

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.

Length: 1 hr and 15 mins
Release date: 01-14-20