Bluff
Poems
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5.0 • 1개의 평가
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- US$11.99
출판사 설명
FINALIST FOR THE 2025 PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 2024 NAACP IMAGE AWARD FOR POETRY
FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2025 MINNESOTA BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
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.
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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. Rooted in critical self-awareness in the midst of ongoing racial violence, mass protest, and political division, the poems showcase Smith's growing skepticism toward poetry that is simply performative in its politics or that fails to radically engage with reality: "poetry/ happens, something to do with my hands/ that's not jailtime, why lie tho, i'm a/ coward, a slave to slavery, it makes me a/ salary." In the wake of George Floyd's murder by police, Smith chronicles protests in the Twin Cities, telling readers, "if the cops kill me/ don't grab your pen/ before you find/ your matches." Animated by an insight born of anger, Smith demands an attention to the present as an antidote to a future that seems increasingly unlikely: "love me now./ tomorrow has no face." It's a necessary and challenging jolt to the system.
