Bøger af Danez Smith

'A writer who never loses their way' New York TimesA 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

2014 Button Poetry Prize Winner "These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way-saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."-Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America."-Rain Taxi

FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRYDanez Smith is our presidentHomie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. 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 the exuberant new book written for Danez and for Danez's friends and for you and for yours.