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.Earn by promoting books
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"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)
"Not to be missed; sure to be one of the best collections of the year."--Sarah Michaelis, Library Journal (starred review) "Smith reminds us that the poem is still a border where the state actively works, a cage that has limits, and can just as easily be intentionally restricted."--Diya Abbas, The Adroit Journal "I am going on record--Bluff is the best collection of the year, and the best collection Danez Smith has ever written. These are poems you are going to want to share with everyone you know, and everyone you don't."-- Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question "Smith's fourth full-length collection arrives in August and looks to be a restless, passionate admixture of forms, a chopped-up sonnet, prose vignettes and political commentaries, a long poem about the Rondo neighborhood in Smith's native St. Paul."--David Woo, Literary Hub "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 "Bluff is a sharply-focused feat, meditating on grief, home, the next world--both here and thereafter--and most unexpectedly, guilt. . . . Bluff is the reckoning we've been looking for."--Henry Hicks IV, The Brooklyn Rail
