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.
BIO
Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They live in Minneapolis.
REVIEWS
“Composed largely in the wake of the COVID crisis and the aftershocks of George Floyd’s murder, the latest from the Minneapolis-based poet reckons with the responsibility of the practitioners of the medium to both accurately represent and challenge inaccurate representations of communities and lives like theirs.” -- Michelle Hart, Electric Literature
“Not to be missed; sure to be one of the best collections of the year.” -- Sarah Michaelis?, Library Journal (starred review)
“A writer who asks as much of themselves as they do of the reader, Smith uses the full complement of their artistic toolkit in Bluff: essays, hybrid forms, wit, visual art, reportage, and an expansive empathy. It is often too much to keep asking the same people to be bold in their work, but there are never enough words to praise someone’s choice to keep being honest in public. Among other superlatives, Bluff is a test case in poetic Truth with a capital T.” -- Aileen Keown Vaux, The Rumpus
“Smith’s searing fourth collection (after Homie) offers a powerful self-indictment of art and the artist in an age of social and political collapse.” -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
[P] Graywolf Press / August 20, 2024
0.41" H x 8.91" L x 7.07" W (0.64 lbs) 160 pages