Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, Paperback

The highly anticipated second collection by Danez Smith--``Hallelujah is an understatement`` (Patricia Smith)

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.