Bluff: Poems

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 epicenter 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 of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward 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 photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem--part map, part annotation, part visual argument--offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love--those given and made--are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Author: Danez Smith
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 08/20/2024
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 8.91h x 7.07w x 0.41d
ISBN: 9781644452981


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 07/01/2024 pg. 95
Publishers Weekly 07/15/2024

About the Author
Danez Smith is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don't Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award.