Flat lay of 12 poetry books against a bright red background

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Reading lists

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

Homie

The highly anticipated new collection from 2018 Forward Prize winner and poetic star, Danez Smith.

I’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady.

A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness.

Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it’s here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they’ve built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, "your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us"

This book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly

Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come For Us

Homie is how we survive – in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt

Homie is deeply moving and funny… [and] a step change from Smith’s earlier work

The president of black voices in poetry. Smith uses their new collection to explore the ideas of friendship, intimacy and comfort

I return to this collection to remind myself of what is possible on the page, the joy, the rigour, the necessity of a strut. Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be

A great collection of poetry about friendship, sex and Blackness. It's rare for me to go back to poetry but I come back to this again and again... It's beautiful

A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all

Homie felt like a book for this year as we learned to look after one another in new ways

[Homie] filled me with pure joy. It is a book as inventive, funny, sad, warm and sharp as any I've ever read

Much of Smith's early success came through the slam poetry scene... Homie makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page

Danez Smith is the author of Homie (2020) and Don’t Call Us Dead (2018), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Four Quartets Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Award. They live in Minneapolis.

'A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness,' Guardian 
 
'In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones' lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle' Amanda Gorman 
 
A mighty anthem about the saving grace of friendship, Danez Smith's highly anticipated collection Homie is rooted in their search for joy and intimacy in a time where both are scarce. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption. 
 
Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is written for friends: for Danez's friends, for yours. 
 
'This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way' New York Times

Don't Call Us Dead

The highly anticipated collection by Danez Smith: ‘One of the year’s essential books’ NPR

This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies, gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level of craft here is impeccable

Tremendously moving, an exalting and longed-for acknowledgement of historical pain ... Smith’s ability to look death squarely in the eye and seize from it language that is fertile with myth, beauty and intellect is astonishing

A powerful and moving read. Smith pays tribute to the young black men America has lost to police shootings, racism and injustice, and writes disarmingly about life and sex with HIV, all in a restless verse

Haunting … This material is necessarily bleak, but Smith’s mercurial invention means it’s never merely grim … The visionary 23-page opener, “summer, somewhere” […] is something truly remarkable; a song from a sunlit afterlife, an “unpopular heaven” for black boys killed young, all delivered in taut couplets …Memorable, moving and imbued with moral purpose. I read and re-read this collection (particularly its opening poem) over several weeks… “summer, somewhere” is, by any measure, a brilliant poem

[Danez Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy… they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. And they are, in their cadences and management of lines, deeply literary. I hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest who jury-rigged his verse to express personal turmoil, and Hart Crane, whose gentleness was expressed in an American idiom full of thunderclap, and Allen Ginsberg, who loved and learned from them both. The addition of Smith’s star turns a random cluster of points into a constellation, the way new work of this calibre always does… In this moving, unsettling work, the question is not simply one of craft. It’s about how the body and its authority can be manifested in writing, with only the spindly trace of letters to stand in for it

Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to strain... This will be one of the year's essential books

Danez Smith's is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity—not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don't Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering

Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars

Danez Smith is a poet of exceptional linguistic exuberance, style and grace

[An] achingly gorgeous poetry collection by the brilliant Danez Smith ... There is a hope here, pleas and prayers; these poems pierce and they burn, they work as incantations, they lift you up, but refuse to settle you back down. They are miraculous, sublime; if you do one thing for yourself this summer, let it be to read this book, and linger over each and every word

What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency. Don’t Call Us Dead is an historical commentary, a scientific document, a personal narrative, and a formal poetics. Smith uses every tool of craft at a poet’s disposal to deliver powerful, urgent, deliberate, crucial poems. Don’t miss this book

Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page . . . Smith can’t help but be breathtaking in style and substance

Where the stakes of living are high, Danez Smith puts their body right on the front line—‘i survived yesterday,’ they write, ‘spent it ducking bullets.’ In an America that conspires against black, brown, queer, and trans bodies, Danez writes poems of insistence and resistance; they anticipate a better world for all of us ‘where everything is sanctuary &amp; nothing is a gun.’

Smith transcends elegy in this intimate, humorous, and biting collection in which he writes of desire, mortality, white supremacy, and more

Danez Smith is an original – that rare blend between raw blinding light, an instinct for the well aright line, the courage to walk into his own love and pain armed only with the fragile hope of words, and a fire so unique it’s all his own. In Don’t Call Us Dead he demands we stand only in the truth of our own fear and build a love that’s so redemptive and real. If you have ever lost faith, if you want to believe in life, then you must read this book – it will humble and uplift you, leave you understanding that in the face of it all, there is only awe

Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to ‘those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,’ Smith’s powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle

The content as well as the writing is transcendent

These poems work to drive open a space of hope and resistance. Smith’s visions of the afterlife are visions of this world caught and held in a moment between hates… It should go without saying that these poems’ concerns speak as urgently to readers in the UK as the US

[Don’t Call Us Dead] might just be the year’s best poem [collection]

Tristram Fane Saudner, **Books of the Year**

Danez Smith’s debut poetry collection, [insert] boy, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and has published poems in Granta, Poetry and The Best American Poetry. Smith lives in Minneapolis.

*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018* 
*A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017* 
 
*A Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2018* 
 
‘[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 ground-breaking 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 an HIV-positive diagnosis. 
 
‘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 an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

Danez Smith

**A Time Magazine '100 Must-Read Books of 2024'** 
'[In Bluff], Smith asks: How can one read poetry at a time like this? ... And yet, within Bluff, there are almost 150 pages of poetry begging to be read—haunting, grief-stricken, hopeful poetry'

**Time Magazine, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024**

'I didn't think Danez Smith could get any more brilliant. I was wrong. A book that whispers to your bones. This is a book I will keep open. There is too much inside to ever let it close. You will want to underline, to highlight, to heart almost every line. Yes, everybody should read this book; not only for what is said, but for the impeccable, experimental and essential poetry in which it is written. This is one of the best books of poetry I've read: buy it for anyone you love'

'Smith’s interrogation of poetry’s complicity in suffering is expressed in brilliantly crafted, rhythmically complex verse'

Danez Smith is one of the most important American poets of our age… Bluff’s vantage point is dark and original and foregrounds the historical significance of this time of racial reckonings… and perhaps signifies a new era of politically conscious poetry that rejects ideas of individual empowerment in favour of enlightenment

'In this latest collection Smith returns to examinations of racism, of its insidious violence, and of resistance to it. But this new work also strikingly explores the idea of the poet’s culpability, about how we write about injustices without profiting from them, either financially or in deeper cultural terms. There is an honesty in the work that is at times overwhelming, a book too hot to touch. This is Smith’s gift, this search for a sense of truth - or even justice - in a world without much of either. Inventive, restless, awe struck, and grieving, Smith pushes language and sonics like no other poet. In their steepled hands, poems become prayers to a god we are afraid to look at. It might be too early to declare, but I don't think so. Bluff is my book of the year. Absolutely breathtaking'

Joelle Taylor, author of C+nto & Othered Poems

'Bluff is a gripping collection that breaks the fourth wall. It is cathartic in its outpouring, inviting the reader to join, and be present. It’s as though the world is a scattered puzzle that Danez analyses and bears witness to. A reality, a mourning, an abstractness in making sense of, and motions to piece together’

Uncompromising. Devastating. Ever radical. Danez Smith’s latest poetry collection, Bluff, proliferates with defiant imaginaries

Ever inventive and tender, here Smith’s piercing honesty is sharper than ever

A powerful new collection reckoning with America, protest and poetry itself

‘A writer who never loses their way’ New York Times 
 
A searing new collection from the Forward Prize-winning American poet about the year that the world’s gaze turned to Minneapolis – Smith's own home. 
 
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. 
 
Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to ‘anti poetica’ and ‘ars america’ to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A brilliant long poem maps the history of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighbourhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it. 
 
Bluff is a manifesto about artistic resilience when the places we most love – those given and made – are burning. In this collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage and imagination to envision futures that seem possible. 
 
‘A poet of exceptional linguistic exuberance, style and grace’ Kayo Chingonyi 
 
‘Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare – a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be’ Raven Leilani on Homie

Danez Smith

Books by Danez Smith

Articles featuring Danez Smith

12 poetry collections to help you understand the world

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