Danez Smith – författare

Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry BooksBefore Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was an eighteen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems, beloved verses like "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," were written without formal training, often on the back of napkins and envelopes, and were inspired by the sights and sounds of Black working-class people he encountered in his early life.Blues in Stereo is a posthumous collection of these early works, in which we see Langston Hughes like we've never seen him before. In the intimate pages of his handwritten journals, you will travel with Hughes outside of Harlem as he ventures to the American South and Mexico, sails through the Caribbean, and becomes the only Harlem renaissance poet to visit Africa. He celebrates love as a tool of liberation in his poems and journal entries. His songs included showcase musicality of verse poetry. And the book even includes a play he co-wrote with Duke Ellington with a full score that experiments with rhythm and structure.Blues in Stereo portrays a young man coming of age in a changing world. Page by page, a young, fresh-faced Hughes contends with matters beyond his years with raw talent. National Book Award nominated poet Danez Smith offers their insight and notes on themes, challenges, and obsessions that Hughes early work contains. Blues in Stereo foreshadows a master poet that will go on to define literature for centuries to come.

*WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018**A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017**A Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2018*‘[Smith’s] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy’ The New Yorker Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a ground-breaking 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 an HIV-positive diagnosis. ‘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 an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

'A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness,' Guardian'In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones' lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle' Amanda GormanA mighty anthem about the saving grace of friendship, Danez Smith's highly anticipated collection Homie is rooted in their search for joy and intimacy in a time where both are scarce. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption.Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is written for friends: for Danez's friends, for yours.'This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way' New York Times

A searing new collection from the Forward Prize-winning American poet about the year 2020, the year that the world’s gaze turned to Minneapolis – Smith's own home.**A TIME MAGAZINE '100 Must-Read Books of 2024'**'Bluff is my book of the year. Absolutely breathtaking' Joelle Taylor, author of C+NTO: + Othered Poems'You will want to underline almost every line ... One of the best books of poetry I've read: buy it for anyone you love' Hollie McNish, author of Plum'Gripping ... It’s as though the world is a scattered puzzle that Danez analyses and bears witness to' Yomi Sode, author of ManorismWritten during the time the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their responsibility as a poet and with their hometown.Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, new textual shapes and a deep self-scrutiny. Ars poetica gives way to 'ars america'. A photographic collage makes clear the consequence of accepting mass shootings. A brilliant long poem maps the history of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighbourhood, before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.Bluff is a manifesto about artistic resilience when the places we most love – those given and made – are burning. In this collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.PRAISE FOR DANEZ SMITH:‘A poet of exceptional linguistic exuberance, style and grace’ Kayo Chingonyi, author of Kumukanda‘A writer who never loses their way’ New York Times'Smith’s ability to look death squarely in the eye and seize from it language that is fertile with myth, beauty and intellect is astonishing' Sandeep Parmar, Guardian