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.