From an award-winning and "stunningly talented" writer, reflections on the line between sexual freedom and sexual exploitation (Samantha Irby, New York Times–bestselling author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life).Women's sexuality is often used as a weapon against them. In this refreshing, unapologetic debut, award-winning performance poet and playwright Britteney Black Rose Kapri lends her unmistakable voice to fraught questions of identity, se...

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2024 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2025 ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYWINNER OF THE 2025 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRYWritten 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 reck...

**Finalist for the National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection“[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy.”—**The New YorkerAward-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 sho...

**FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRYFINALIST FOR THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRYDanez Smith is our president**Homie is Danez Smith’s magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that...

2014 Button Poetry Prize Winner "These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make 'a dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol.' That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way–saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, black movie repeats."–Marcus Wicker "Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that l...

Publishers Weekly’s **Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry BooksFrom Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, a stunning collection of early works written from 1921-1927 curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith. Hanif Abdurraqib calls the collection of polished poems and raw, unfinished, works-in-progress, “a gift to any poet working at any stage of their life and career.”**Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synony...

Publishers Weekly’s **Top Ten Fall 2024 Poetry BooksFrom Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes*,* a stunning collection of early works written from 1921-1927 and curated by award winning poet and National Book Award finalist, Danez Smith.**Before Langston Hughes and his literary prowess became synonymous with American poetry, he was a seventeen-year-old on a train to Mexico City, seeking funds to pursue his passion. His early poems, beloved verses like “T...

Danez Smith is our presidentHomie is Danez Smith's magnificent anthem about the saving grace of friendship. Rooted in the loss of one of Smith's close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy within a nation where both can seem scarce and getting scarcer. 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, ...

Finalist for the National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the Forward Prize for Best CollectionAward-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 long...

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 ...

Brave, clear-eyed, and passionate, Stakes Is High is the book we need to guide us past crisis mode and through an uncertain future.The events of the past decade have forced us to reckon with who we are and who we want to be. We have been invested in a set of beliefs about our American identity: our exceptionalism, the inevitable rightness of our path, the promise that hard work and determination will carry us to freedom. But in Stakes Is High, Myc...

In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses...