Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

Danez Smith

Jan 2020 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Danez Smith

About this audiobook

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.

About the author

Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don't Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award.