Don't Call Us Dead

August 1, 2017

In this remarkable second collection from Kate Tufts/Lambda Award winner Smith, the content as well as the writing is transcendent. A core poem, "dear white america," already viewed in a YouTube reading by over 300,000 people, opens with the observation, "i've left Earth in search of darker planets," and every line that follows is a stab-in-the-heart summation of the consequences of racism, delivered in taut, pearlescent prose. Claiming that "my grandmother's hallelujah is only outdone by the fear she nurses every time the blood-fat summer swallows another child," Smith demands, "take your God back," adding "I am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & I just don't see race." In the end, the poet looks for a place where there's a "history you cannot steal or sell or cast overboard...or redline or shackle or silence." That longing also surfaces in the opening poem, which evokes a sort of sunlit afterlife where black males killed violently gather freely and "jump// in the air and hang there," unburdened by fear. These two poems alone are worth the price of admission, but the whole collection measures up. VERDICT Highly recommended.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 17, 2017
Smith follows the Lambda Literary Award–winning debut boy with a further display of transcendent talent for close-to-the bone articulation, celebrating the lives of “we citizens/ of an unpopular heaven// & low-attended crucifixions.” Poised at the bruising intersection of black and queer identity, poems such as “dear white america” (“I tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral making plans for brunch”) lose no impact moving from spoken-word stage to page. Smith brilliantly metaphorizes the experience of receiving an HIV diagnosis in Lorca-esque fashion, as becoming “a book of antonyms” and leavens the gravity with moments of mordant wit. An erasure of Diana Ross lyrics leaves the message “if there’s a cure for this/ i want it,” capturing camp’s confrontation with the intolerable. Though visually and formally varied, the collection’s most striking pyrotechnics are rhetorical: “& he will say tonight, I want to take you/ how the police do, unarmed & sudden.” Describing a “down-low house party,” a speaker observes: “we say yo meaning let my body// be a falcon’s talon & your body be the soft innards of goats.” Luminous and piercing, this collection reassembles shattering realities into a shimmering and sharp mosaic.

Starred review from September 1, 2017
In a note on the body, slam poet Smith (insert boy, 2014) writes, Everyday you wake you raise the dead / everything you do is a miracle. Smith accomplishes both in this searing exploration of systemic violence and what it means to be black and queer on land who doesn't always love you back. The stunning opener, summer, somewhere, envisions a lavender-laced afterlife for black boys killed by police. Here, everything / is sanctuary & nothing is a gun. With piercing precision and striking formal variation, Smith grapples with America's insidious past and present, pangs of desire ( if love is a room / of broken glass, leave me to dance / until my feet are memory ), and an HIV-positive diagnosis. The poet summons hope, too, in a movie dubbed Dinosaurs in the Hood, the modest promise of tomorrow, and, in little prayer, a most divine demand: let ruin end here. 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, Beyonce, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)