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 Yorker Award-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 longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality-the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood-and a diagnosis of HIV positive. \"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 America-\"Dear White America\"-where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. | Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith, Paperback | Indigo Chapters