Black Person/Poet (they/them)
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Articles by Danez Smith
(BPRW) Voices That Resonate: Celebrating Black Poetry This National Poetry Month | Black PR Wire, Inc.
For Immediate Release Contact Information Newsroom@BlackPRWire.com 877-BLACKPR (BPRW) Voices That Resonate: Celebrating Black Poetry This National Poetry Month (Black PR Wire) Poetry has long been a powerful form of expression within the Black community — a space where truth is spoken, culture is preserved, and emotions are given voice.
the joke / less hope by Danez Smith
pretty much my first career: to take Friday’s horror & make it Wednesday humor the swelling had ended & so the laughter could bloat on the porch, only kin of bloodlock & marriage-bed James, you just drunk just like her, akimbo & decades tired in her tone just drunk! i don’t understand! do grandma again, nezzy! just drunk! what made me weep & hide & fist-in-his-back weekends now was my currency of cute, a requested delight Go to hell, Barbara! Just go to hell! & how papa be lookin, neno?
Minnesota Goddam
Somewhere back in 2020, in the long night after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd—the latest in the endless procession of those whose lives have been stolen by agents of law enforcement, after Philando Castile, after Thurman Blevins, after Breonna Taylor, after Tamir Rice—and as people rose up in the Twin Cities and around the world, I called my dear friend, the poet Franny Choi.
An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good
An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good Stephen Maturen Renee, we didn’t get a chance to meet, but I’m sure we would have. We are both poets and share a vision of a future where our communities are safe and valued. Yesterday, you were living up to your name, making the kind of “good trouble” John Lewis spoke about. You were observing and documenting the ICE raids Trump’s rogue administration has plagued our city of Minneapolis with.
They/Them
said short: i feel more like a stud. said with some nuance: as if i came to masculinity through the women’s gate, as if a daughter who grew into her father but not like trans, but like trans or a transformation without catalyst or smoke. or more like born in the right body too early or born at the wrong time, in the wrong language.
Best New Poetry Books for Adults
Bar-Nadav reimagines modern-day wellness from her perspective of a medical editor whose family history of Holocaust survival prompts her dissection of the pharmaceutical industry in a series of erasures and referential narratives. "Betta fish are a motif," Duong informs in his poem, "Novel." The fish stand in for conflicts of all sorts: familial, ecological, migratory, creative.
Essex Hemphill’s Voice Is Urgent
Frieze PublishingYes, email me reviews, offers, and opinions by artists, writers, and editors from Frieze Frieze EventsYes, email me Frieze Events Inc and Frieze Events Ltd’s global programme information including special offers and benefits This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 251, ‘Afterlife’ Forgive me, but lately I find myself unable to write anything that doesn’t sound like prayer, screaming or manifesto.
Cruising at the LA Fitness - The Paris Review
By Danez Smith January 27, 2025 Before the sweat, before the bench press, before the sauna, before the shower, before placing my hand around a man, inside a man, around his throat so desperate for my hand, I take off my ring. While walking up to the doors of LA Fitness, I tuck the proof of my husband into my fanny pack. *** I’ve been to LA Fitness franchises in Philly, in Portland, in Atlanta, in Chicago.
'Bluff' Is One of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024 Original
These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser. By Rebecca Schneid November 13, 2024 8:07 AM EST In “anti poetica,” the opening poem of Bluff by Danez Smith, they announce there is “no poem to free you.” Smith asks: How can one read poetry at a time like this?
Danez Smith: Elegies for Our Fellow Animals
Twenty-One Elegies who owns the grief of these wings? how does the sky mourn? in revenge, the crows peck holes in our rising prayers. in protest, the rain refuses. no, we killed the rain. & the catfish. & the mussels. & the flying fox. the white of our palms a curse we pass by making, wanting. awful kings, everything we touch we bless out of existence. what will be alive at the end of us? the ōʻō gone even the name shocked at its passing. Hawaii, like anything, dies a little bit every day she’s American.
“relativity,” a poem by Danez Smith
“relativity” Article continues after advertisement it’s been centuries inside this grief & since, electricity in the home then in the hands, but – still – the fields then the gravity under a collapsed sun & each bullet its own star & the gravity under that knee, that hold that seemed to send time echoing back & forward & still. like sound from a bell, bleeding from the sky & still stuck inside dancing until dead.
Poem - Mizna
Poem By by Danez Smith We are honored to publish Danez Smith’s “Poem,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. We would also like to extend a special congratulations to Danez Smith on the release of their poetry collection, Bluff—check it out here! nature i hear your prayer. i see your terror. i know my teeth. — Danez Smith I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones?
This Collection of Poems Is Skeptical About Poetry's Value. Or Is It? Original
So what has changed? A shift, maybe, in abiding tone? Where "Homie" was ecstatic, "Bluff" is grimly vatic. We've left behind "the window, the wind, the flowers, the hive,/myqueenmyqueenmyqueen!" and friends "whose names burst my heart/to joyful smithereens" to arrive at "my people ain't even my people.
“Last Black American Poem,” a Poem by Danez Smith
Last Black American Poem Article continues after advertisement Voted for the negro twice, twice my captor Wore my face. Admit it, Danez, you loved Your master in your shade. Yes, I loved Knowing the color at the end of my chain Matched mine. ((Wrong river. It wasn’t chains It was water when one of us helmed the boat. Water for our eyes, water raised to the lips Of cargo. Still cargo. In summer We turned down that Jeezy, learning a new one’s Slain name. The helm and still.
“Last Black American Poem,” a Poem by Danez Smith
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Bluff
?Danez Smith is a powerhouse of poetry.? Literary Hub Uitgeverij Van Ditmar Boekenimport B.V. Imprint Vintage Publishing Uitgegeven als Paperback Eerste editie 20-08-2024 Laatste editie 22-08-2024 ISBN 9781644452981 • 9781784745738 Aantal pagina's 160 Taal Engels
Don’t Call Us Dead
DON’T CALL US DEAD By Danez Smith Spoken Word can and does take us to many places. It can speak to us from a place of inspiration, of pain, of life experience, of love, of fantasy worlds. It can flow with the beauty of phrase. It can be gritty. It can fill us with hope. Most of all, poetry is personal. That being said, I bring to you Danez Smith’s poetry collection Don’t Call Us Dead.
The September 2024 Indie Next List Preview
Aug 07 2024 The September 2024 Indie Next List Preview Printer-friendly version Here are the 25 Indie Next List and 6 Now in Paperback picks on the September 2024 Indie Next List flier. The September title list is also viewable as a collection on Edelweiss and on the Indie Next List page as an Excel file alongside PDFs for the month’s flier and shelf-talker templates. Learn more and visit Matchbook Marketing’s program page to sign up to send the free Indie Next List e-newsletter to customers.
7 Politically Charged Poetry Collections
The late Chuck Kinder once told me, “Fiction should be a fist.” Meaning fiction is a medium suited to emotional honesty, the place to have adult conversations. To engage with the world in all its complexities, and, often, its ugliness. For me, this has meant writing characters who either confront oppression, assist in oppression, or make the choice to ignore and thus abet oppression. To separate their emotional lives from the political is to ignore the reality of human existence.
Black Is Beautiful
Sometimes we forget Black History Month is not about educating others, it’s about celebrating Blackness in this country. And because Blackness is vast and diasporic, every year for Black History Month a theme is chosen. This year, the theme is African Americans & the Arts. Today 5 poets paired with 5 fine artists.
DU Faculty Recommends Books for Black History Month
Black History Month is an opportunity to expand your reading horizons with a few great books by Black authors. We asked Katherine Crowe, associate professor and curator of Special Collections and Archives in University Libraries, and Maik Nwosu, professor and chair in the Department of English and Literary Arts for some of their favorites.
32 books you heard about on CBC Radio last week
Check out the books discussed on national CBC Radio programs from Jan. 1-7, 2024! Calling all writers! The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is now open Carpentaria byAlexis Wright Heard on: Writers & Company When Indigenous author Alexis Wright was growing up in Cloncurry, Queensland, her grandmother often talked about their traditional lands in the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
31 books you heard about on CBC Radio last week
Books Check out the books discussed on national CBC Radio programs from Jan. 1-7, 2024! Check out the books discussed on national CBC Radio programs from Jan. 1-7, 2024! Calling all writers! The 2024 CBC Nonfiction Prize is now open Naturally Tan by Tan France Heard on: The Next Chapter As one of the "Fab Five" on Netflix's hit show Queer Eye, fashion expert Tan France helps people become better versions of themselves.
Prose Poetry as Rebellion
“Which of us has not,” writes Charles Baudelaire in the introduction to Paris Spleen, “in his moments of ambition, dreamed the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm or rime, sufficiently supple, sufficiently abrupt, to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of the soul, to the windings and turnings of the fancy, to the sudden starts of the conscience?” Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen is one of the earliest collections of prose poems in the West.
James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel
Book Review|James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/books/review/the-heaven-and-earth-grocery-store-james-mcbride.html Fiction “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well, and then flashes back to explore its connection to a town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history. Aug.
Diversify Your Reading: Black and Queer Literature
Content warning: These recommendations reference racism, sexual assault, and domestic violence. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Winner of the 2007 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, this book is the perfect one to begin with. Adichie’s novel imagines the intersection of various lives in 1960s Nigeria, including Ugwu, who works as a houseboy, and Olanna, who gives up her old life for love.
(don't worry) if there's a hell below, we're all going to go—sonnet, chopped & screwed | AGNI Online
Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections, including Bluff (forthcoming 2024), Homie (2020), and Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), all from Graywolf Press. Their poetry and prose have been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, *AGNI, *GQ, The Best American Poetry, and on .
anti poetica
Skip to main content Poems Find and share the perfect poems. who cares how long i’ve spent with my poems—those shit psalms those rats of my soul—head first thru the window me at their ankles demanding substance, revelation, sudden gravity—shamed of my leafless, drug shanked brain—this grey popper worn hell—that dark dull circle i try to conquer beauty & the state from within. i’m not revolutionary i’m regular. nothing radical in being the enemy of america, the country of enemies.
The Nation Poetry Reading Series Presents: Martín Espada, Danez Smith, and Maggie Millner
Please join us for our first virtual reading of 2023 featuring poets from the magazine’s pages hosted by Nation Poetry Editor Kaveh Akbar. Audience questions will follow individual readings. Related Articles Free of charge (but registration required.) Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a Massachusetts Book Award.
Assotto Saint's Poetry Taught Me How to Live Again
In the pictures of him I adore most, the late poet Assotto Saint is craned skyward, his expression as soft as the light seeking him through the window, composed like a man who spent his young years studying the women around him, now perched with the easy regality of the mothers and aunties on the porches they made thrones.
In ‘This Other Eden,’ a Historical Tale of Paradise Lost
Book Review|In ‘This Other Eden,’ a Historical Tale of Paradise Lost https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/books/review/this-other-eden-paul-harding.html Fiction In his latest novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding reimagines the history of a small mixed-race community’s devastating eviction from their homes. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Jan.
I’m going back to Issaquah, where sadness makes sense
Author’s note: This piece and its title are inspired by a poem by Danez Smith. My first thought when I return home from Stanford is that the world here is cast in a whole different color palette: mottled greens and earthy browns, muted tones shrouded in overcast gray. I think, no wonder Twilight was shot with that depressive blue tint. This is it: overbearing, yet accurate. On visits home, I always pay my respects to the sprawling park that raised me, a five-minute walk away.
Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs Danez Smith Share via Facebook Share via Twitter Copy link to clipboard Share via text message she crying for all us – her brother, son, me, everyone someone’s boy – before the wedding, henny wrecked, lovewhelmed, meaning well so much – she says – Black boys go thru these days: gay, transgender, gangbanging – i know what she means, i try to not be criminalized i know she doesn’t see us as crimes, maybe sins, but sense to her, since i know my own mother – i know she means the...
dream where every black person is standing by the ocean
Find and share the perfect poems. & we say to her what have you done with our kin you swallowed? & she says that was ages ago, you’ve drunk them by now & we don’t understand & then one woman, skin dark as all of us walks to the water’s lip, shouts Emmett, spits &, surely, a boy begins crawling his way to shore Copyright © Danez Smith. Used with permission of the author. somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown as rye play the dozens & ball, jump in the air & stay there.
Travis Alabanza shares the 5 books that made them
From Elizabeth Wurtzel’s polarising classic Prozac Nation, to bell hooks’ All About Love 10November 2022 Travis Alabanza is not afraid to own their contradictions. “When I was writing my book I had a gender crisis; I didn’t even know if I felt non-binary or trans anymore, or knew what I wanted to look like.” The book in question is, of course, None of The Above: part memoir, part gender theory.
My End of the World
10.17.2022 When it feels as if the world is unraveling, nature remains a source of sublimity. But who is afforded access to beauty during times of apocalypse? My mind wasn’t well living in Philly.
NO NOS DEIS POR MUERTOS
ARREBATO LIBROS - 9788412470840 Literatura Poesía Poesía contemporánea extranjera del XIX al XXI Resumen de NO NOS DEIS POR MUERTOS Danez Smith es une poeta y performer afroamericane, queer y seropositive que no ha dejado de ganar premios desde que comenzó a publicar. La suya es una poesía fresca, directa, arropadora y sincera.
less hope
fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark apologies. i was part of the joy industrial complex, told them their bodies were miracles & they ate it, sold someday, made money off soon & now. i snuck an ode into the elegy, forced the dead to smile & juke. implied America, said destroy but offered nary step nor tool. i paid taxes knowing where the funds go. in April, my offering to my mother’s slow murder. by May my sister filled with the bullets i bought. June & my father’s life locked in a box i built.
Get Into These Inspiring Books By Queer Black Authors
MadameNoire Featured Video When policies put limitations on them and businesses shut their doors to them, queer people always had the pen as their last weapon to fight for their rights. From secret periodicals to anonymous authors, the queer community has made sure that their stories and voices were heard – even when the mainstream media didn’t want them to be.
From the Archive: National Poetry Month Day 8: “cum shot” by Danez Smith
From the Archive: National Poetry Month Day 8: “cum shot” by Danez Smith This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 8, 2015. cum shot how long has it been since his legs stretched towards heaven? lord, let him be, don’t strike him for believing he’s you. he’s high this morning, he called his body his body & believed it someone touched his body did not pirate him away someone rocked him so good he danced to the music of his own bones’ surrender he was blessed enough to plead mercy lord.
Literary Conversations: Spoken Words
Join PEN/Faulkner for the final Literary Conversation of the season: Spoken Words, featuring critically acclaimed poets and spoken word artists Fatimah Asghar, Olivia Gatwood, Danez Smith, and moderator Nate Marshall. This Literary Conversation will include readings and performances by our featured authors and will be followed by a live Q&A with the audience. Live captioning will also be available for this event.
American Poetry Review - Danez Smith - "my deepest & most ashamed apologies to Assotto Saint"
who i called Assanto in my previous collection which was edited by several well-paid folks & the rat babble fuck of a poem (“gay cancer”) also passed thru the young hands of some young editors at a young journal & even Jeff Shotts’ reading ass didn’t catch your name double sainted in the middle cause it was my Black job to know you & put you down right i who found you in the library’s slow-came, ripped mirror i who found you again when i found myself bloodbottomed i whose duty was to give the...
Ato Blankson-Wood reads "king the color of space/tower of molasses & marrow" by Danez Smith
I hear music rise off your skin. Each hair on your arm a tiny viola. A wind full of bows blows & all I hear is the brown hum of your flesh, a symphony of pigment too often drowned out by the gun songs & sirens. Don’t listen to that music. You are the first light in the morning, the dark edge of the sun. You are too beautiful for bullets. You, long the poster child for metal wrecked bodies, are too precious for the dirt’s greedy teeth.
Poetry Unbound: Danez Smith — i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense
[music: “Praise the Rain” by Gautam Srikishan] Pádraig Ó Tuama: My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and I lived in Australia for four years. And when I was moving back to Ireland somebody said to me, “Oh God, you’re going to miss the sun. You know, you’ll be there in all that long, gray year of Ireland.” And I remember realizing in the moment how wrong they were. I was really looking forward to getting back to the Irish climate. I know not everybody loves it, but I do.
i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense
o California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for her? i’m over the ocean i stood at its lip, dressed in down, praying for snow. i know, i’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. i know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
three Black poems from August by Danez Smith - Poems | Academy of American Poets
There are gods of fertility, corn, childbirth, & police brutality—this last is offered praise & sacrifice near weekly & still cannot be sated—many-limbed, thin-skinned, its colors are blue & black, a cross- hatch of bruise & bulletholes punched out like my son’s three-hole notebooks— pages torn like lungs, excised or autopsied, splayed open on a cold table or left in the street for hours to stew.
In the Event Of by Shane McCrae - Poems | Academy of American Poets
I go to the railroad tracks And follow them to the station of my enemies A cobalt-toothed man pitches pennies at my mugshot negative All over the united states, there are Toddlers in the rock I see why everyone out here got in the big cosmic basket And why blood agreements mean a lot And why I get shot back at I understand the psycho-spiritual refusal to write white history or take the glass freeway White skin tattooed on my right forearm Ricochet sewage near where I collapsed into a...
This $30 Amazon Purchase Leveled Up My Self-Care Routine
When it comes to cleansing, you're either a shower person or a bath person (even if you do both). I was a member of the first camp for years and held a strong belief that showers > baths. And then, things changed. My conversion to #TeamBath started slowly then it happened all at once—I was venting to a friend and she suggested taking a bath to de-stress.
Poem: waiting on you to die so i can be myself
By Danez Smith Selected by Reginald Dwayne Betts Sept. 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET Two lines keep bringing me back: “i’m waiting for a few folks/i love dearly to die so i can be myself.” In this world filled, sometimes, with more breakdowns than breaks, it feels sometimes an anachronism to hear anybody say they love somebody deeply. Then it hurts a bit to remember all that comes with love. Who among us ain’t been a bit afraid to be they whole entire self? Who doesn’t understand that desire?
We Were Bad - [PANK]
listen to this story When she fucked me we imagined we were fucking other people, like Jane, for example, from our chemistry class, with the soft round calves and the horn-rimmed glasses, with the thin ankles and trembling hands. When I kissed her ear and talked about Jane’s slender wrists, her golden tan, her fingers-fat with yellow tips from smoking packs of Camel Blues-she shuddered.
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