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Bluff: Poems
Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID 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 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 American 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 the city 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.
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 American 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 the city 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.
160 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2024
161 people are currently reading
7225 people want to read
About the author
Danez Smith
28 books1,144 followersDanez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their 2nd collection will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Their work has published & featured widely including in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, & Ploughshares. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly - Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and a recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing 2nd in 2014. They edit for The Offing & are a founding member of 2 collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. They live in the midwest most of the time.
Danez was featured in American Academy of Poet's Emerging Writers Series by National Book Award Finalist Patricia Smith. Like her, Danez bridges the poetics of the stage to that of the page. Danez's work transcends arbitrary boundaries to present work that is gripping, dismantling of oppression constructs, and striking on the human heart. Often centered around intersections of race, class, sexuality, faith, and social justice, Danez uses rhythm, fierce raw power, and image to re-imagine the world as takes it apart in their work.
Danez was featured in American Academy of Poet's Emerging Writers Series by National Book Award Finalist Patricia Smith. Like her, Danez bridges the poetics of the stage to that of the page. Danez's work transcends arbitrary boundaries to present work that is gripping, dismantling of oppression constructs, and striking on the human heart. Often centered around intersections of race, class, sexuality, faith, and social justice, Danez uses rhythm, fierce raw power, and image to re-imagine the world as takes it apart in their work.
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August 2, 2025
‘If I can’t be the freed, let me be the corrosion’
While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise voiceless, art has its limitations. ‘There is no poem greater than feeding someone,’ Danez Smith decries the limitations of the form, ‘no poem to admonish the state / no poem with a key to the local / no poem to free you.’ Returning with his third collection, Bluff, the poet who once wrote ‘my poems are fed up & getting violent,’ returns with works that check the fault lines of art, staggering but strong in the wake of the first half of a new decade that arrived with an outpouring of grief, violence, protest and frustrations. Living in Minneapolis, Danez Smith chronicles the reactions to the murder of George Floyd amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, placing us into a reality where ‘my neighbors are dying. / my neighbors are killing’ and the alarm that ‘we became our own cops.’ With a sharp aim at social ills, the society that enables them, and a reckoning with one’s own inevitable complicity in our own greater oppressions, Danez Smith’s Bluff shows the now-seasoned poet at the top of their game in gorgeous verse that bears a powerful bite.
ars poetica
fuck all that other shit
even when the fog cleared
the wrong sky on my mind
the horizon at the end of pity
is a useless sun, hotheaded
& bitter-born light, let the daughter
rise when my earth meets the clouds
what her say? what next she believe in
& nurse? my big bad for how
long i spent making apologies
for what i ain't do, caught myself
sorry for bodies the nation caught
in its borderless maw, caught myself
washing blood off someone else's hands.
i'm off that, that being the mode
that made a cage of guilt out my depression
that being what fault i fell into
& dressed into a lovely but ineffective grave.
what i'm sorry for: making poetry
into a house of rebuttals, a temple for the false
gods of stagnant argument & dead-end feels.
here, in these lines, in these rooms
i add my blues & my gospels to the record
of now, i offer my scratched golds
to the blueprint of possible. dear reader
whenever you are reading this
is the future to me, which means
tomorrow is still coming, which means
today still lives, which means
there is still time
for beautiful, urgent change
which means there is still time
to make more alive
which means there is still
poetry
In every way, Bluff reveals itself to be a collection that desires ‘justice the verb not justice the dream.’ The dilemma, as we find all throughout the poetry, is that the idea of a perfect world is complex, out of reach, set up to fail simply by the contradictory needs of people even in the best of circumstances. They ask ‘what is my eden? is it mine? is our eden the same as mine?’ and what spaces are there in the already limited space for queer people or Black people in a society that tries to erase them through violence. Literal violence as well as social, emotional and economic violence. ‘I don’t want a country’ they proclaim throughout the book, ‘look at what countries have done / the borders perform a killing floor.’ Smith looks at a country that can kill for profit, that wears its disdain for those who are different on its sleeve, and is tired and sick of it.
i don't want America no more.
i want to be a citizen of something new.
i want a country for the immigrant hero. I
want a country where joy is indigenous as the people.
i want a country that keeps its word.
i want to not be scared to drink the water.
i want a country that don't bomb other countries.
i want a country that don't treat its people
like a virus. i want a country not trying
to cure itself of me. i want a country
that treats my mama right. i want a land
where my sister can be free. i want a country
that don't look at me & my man & think
about where & how we should burn.
i want a nation under a kinder god.
i want justice the verb not justice the dream.
i want what was promised to me.
i want forty acres & a vote that matters.
i want no prisons & a mule.
i want all lives to matter. i want to be over with race
but race ain't over me.
i want peace. i want equity. i want guns
to be melted into a mosque, a church
someplace for us to pray toward better gods
& i wanna stop praying for my country
to be mine, for it to put the gun down
take the bomb back.
—from principles
Smith addresses the social ills, centering on the violence and grief that rocks the nation on a daily basis. Of particular note is the rampant gun violence, the guns sold for the purpose of profit that leave small children dead on classroom floors. ‘“If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.’ They write about the protests in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and the ways people tried to dismiss the horrors of violence by equating property destruction as somehow a valid complaint in juxtaposition:
But Smith also recognizes we are somehow all complicit in the ills of the world. Even when we protest ‘tired of yelling at the machine / shaking our angry, nonviolent fists at the nuts & cogs / & the next day, resuming our roles as oil and sparks / taking place inside the machine’ How can we fight a machine we exist within, they ask.
‘if the cops kill me
don’t grab your pen
before you find
your matches.’
Smith turns this criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating their own complicity in ‘the joy industrial complex’ as they write in the poem less hope:
they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.
we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty
&, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them.
i took the awards & cashed the checks.
i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names
for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book
They express guilt for having supported empire when ‘my captor / Wore my face,’ as he writes in Last Black American Poem about former President Obama. ‘Admit it, Danez, you loved / your master in your shade’ they write, ‘as bombs dropped / in the middle of childhoods.’ There is a strong reckoning in these poems about poetry as an art that cannot truly solve the problems and becomes a way to make money from a capitalist system that creates many of the problems poetry critiques. What is one to do, Smith asks us.
‘so why are we in the cage?
because we need to survive.
why do we need to be in the cage?
because they will make use of us
if they don’t find us beautiful.’
—from Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery
Though not all is sadness and bleakness here, as Smith presents a hope that we can come together and rise above. In one poem, when asked ‘what was the world like?’ Smith responds ‘hurt.’ But when asked ‘how did you survive’ the answer is ‘with others.’ Together we can always try, and that is what is important. And perhaps there is no utopia, but Smith still gives us a vision of a better world, one where ‘somewhere my children can write poems about being. / without protest, their songs full of stars.’ It is a lovely dream to strive for.
‘It would be easier if God was dead & we knew it.
Then we could get on with it: the final choice of the human: repair or epilogue.’
This third collection, Bluff, shows Danez Smith as a valuable poet with an extreme talent and one that is not afraid to look critically at oneself as well. A strong reckoning with the violence of a world riddled with grief, climate change, and sorry, but also a strong voice of wisdom asking the right questions, Bluff is an incredible collection of poetry that stands tall.
5/5
‘Summertime at the end of the world, and it’s so beautiful. Trees and rivers and flowers I know by scent and not name. So pretty I could cry. I’ll miss it if we kill it. I guess I’ll miss it.’
—from My Beautiful End of the World
While art can be a great comfort, a great rallying cry, a great way to give voice to the otherwise voiceless, art has its limitations. ‘There is no poem greater than feeding someone,’ Danez Smith decries the limitations of the form, ‘no poem to admonish the state / no poem with a key to the local / no poem to free you.’ Returning with his third collection, Bluff, the poet who once wrote ‘my poems are fed up & getting violent,’ returns with works that check the fault lines of art, staggering but strong in the wake of the first half of a new decade that arrived with an outpouring of grief, violence, protest and frustrations. Living in Minneapolis, Danez Smith chronicles the reactions to the murder of George Floyd amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, placing us into a reality where ‘my neighbors are dying. / my neighbors are killing’ and the alarm that ‘we became our own cops.’ With a sharp aim at social ills, the society that enables them, and a reckoning with one’s own inevitable complicity in our own greater oppressions, Danez Smith’s Bluff shows the now-seasoned poet at the top of their game in gorgeous verse that bears a powerful bite.
ars poetica
fuck all that other shit
even when the fog cleared
the wrong sky on my mind
the horizon at the end of pity
is a useless sun, hotheaded
& bitter-born light, let the daughter
rise when my earth meets the clouds
what her say? what next she believe in
& nurse? my big bad for how
long i spent making apologies
for what i ain't do, caught myself
sorry for bodies the nation caught
in its borderless maw, caught myself
washing blood off someone else's hands.
i'm off that, that being the mode
that made a cage of guilt out my depression
that being what fault i fell into
& dressed into a lovely but ineffective grave.
what i'm sorry for: making poetry
into a house of rebuttals, a temple for the false
gods of stagnant argument & dead-end feels.
here, in these lines, in these rooms
i add my blues & my gospels to the record
of now, i offer my scratched golds
to the blueprint of possible. dear reader
whenever you are reading this
is the future to me, which means
tomorrow is still coming, which means
today still lives, which means
there is still time
for beautiful, urgent change
which means there is still time
to make more alive
which means there is still
poetry
In every way, Bluff reveals itself to be a collection that desires ‘justice the verb not justice the dream.’ The dilemma, as we find all throughout the poetry, is that the idea of a perfect world is complex, out of reach, set up to fail simply by the contradictory needs of people even in the best of circumstances. They ask ‘what is my eden? is it mine? is our eden the same as mine?’ and what spaces are there in the already limited space for queer people or Black people in a society that tries to erase them through violence. Literal violence as well as social, emotional and economic violence. ‘I don’t want a country’ they proclaim throughout the book, ‘look at what countries have done / the borders perform a killing floor.’ Smith looks at a country that can kill for profit, that wears its disdain for those who are different on its sleeve, and is tired and sick of it.
i don't want America no more.
i want to be a citizen of something new.
i want a country for the immigrant hero. I
want a country where joy is indigenous as the people.
i want a country that keeps its word.
i want to not be scared to drink the water.
i want a country that don't bomb other countries.
i want a country that don't treat its people
like a virus. i want a country not trying
to cure itself of me. i want a country
that treats my mama right. i want a land
where my sister can be free. i want a country
that don't look at me & my man & think
about where & how we should burn.
i want a nation under a kinder god.
i want justice the verb not justice the dream.
i want what was promised to me.
i want forty acres & a vote that matters.
i want no prisons & a mule.
i want all lives to matter. i want to be over with race
but race ain't over me.
i want peace. i want equity. i want guns
to be melted into a mosque, a church
someplace for us to pray toward better gods
& i wanna stop praying for my country
to be mine, for it to put the gun down
take the bomb back.
—from principles
Smith addresses the social ills, centering on the violence and grief that rocks the nation on a daily basis. Of particular note is the rampant gun violence, the guns sold for the purpose of profit that leave small children dead on classroom floors. ‘“If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.’ They write about the protests in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and the ways people tried to dismiss the horrors of violence by equating property destruction as somehow a valid complaint in juxtaposition:
”Wont someone please think of the Arby’s?” seems like a very weird place to put your concern. What America are you mourning? Target wasn’t in the fields, cotton-bloodied hands. Walmart never hung from a tree.
But Smith also recognizes we are somehow all complicit in the ills of the world. Even when we protest ‘tired of yelling at the machine / shaking our angry, nonviolent fists at the nuts & cogs / & the next day, resuming our roles as oil and sparks / taking place inside the machine’ How can we fight a machine we exist within, they ask.
‘if the cops kill me
don’t grab your pen
before you find
your matches.’
Smith turns this criticism at poetry and the publishing industry, interrogating their own complicity in ‘the joy industrial complex’ as they write in the poem less hope:
they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.
we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty
&, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them.
i took the awards & cashed the checks.
i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names
for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book
They express guilt for having supported empire when ‘my captor / Wore my face,’ as he writes in Last Black American Poem about former President Obama. ‘Admit it, Danez, you loved / your master in your shade’ they write, ‘as bombs dropped / in the middle of childhoods.’ There is a strong reckoning in these poems about poetry as an art that cannot truly solve the problems and becomes a way to make money from a capitalist system that creates many of the problems poetry critiques. What is one to do, Smith asks us.
‘so why are we in the cage?
because we need to survive.
why do we need to be in the cage?
because they will make use of us
if they don’t find us beautiful.’
—from Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery
Though not all is sadness and bleakness here, as Smith presents a hope that we can come together and rise above. In one poem, when asked ‘what was the world like?’ Smith responds ‘hurt.’ But when asked ‘how did you survive’ the answer is ‘with others.’ Together we can always try, and that is what is important. And perhaps there is no utopia, but Smith still gives us a vision of a better world, one where ‘somewhere my children can write poems about being. / without protest, their songs full of stars.’ It is a lovely dream to strive for.
‘It would be easier if God was dead & we knew it.
Then we could get on with it: the final choice of the human: repair or epilogue.’
This third collection, Bluff, shows Danez Smith as a valuable poet with an extreme talent and one that is not afraid to look critically at oneself as well. A strong reckoning with the violence of a world riddled with grief, climate change, and sorry, but also a strong voice of wisdom asking the right questions, Bluff is an incredible collection of poetry that stands tall.
5/5
‘Summertime at the end of the world, and it’s so beautiful. Trees and rivers and flowers I know by scent and not name. So pretty I could cry. I’ll miss it if we kill it. I guess I’ll miss it.’
—from My Beautiful End of the World
September 20, 2024
Holy shit. Bluff is a collection of poems that everyone should read. I personally consider Danez Smith the most important poetic voice coming out of the United States in recent years. Their poetry hits different. Having read all five of their previous works (from their debut collection [insert] boy, to the pamphlet Black Movie, to their most popular work Don't Call Us Dead, and their most recent one Homie/ My Nig) I find Bluff to be the most daring, challenging and honest. It has become my favorite of their work.
In an interview, Danez has said that this fourth collection asks a very specific question: "Bitch, what is poetry?" Is it just art or a tool to aid the liberation of oppressed peoples? Whatever the answer is, Danez knows what poetry cannot do. It cannot feed people. It cannot get people out of jail. It cannot prevent Black people from being shot by the cops. In "volta", Danez bemoans: "this universe my most docile & stunted / weapons rounded into words, my work / so undangerous". If there is one thing I took away from this collection is that action literally speak louder than words. I sympathise with the struggle of a poet who knows their chosen weapon (words) can never be sharp enough for the horrific world we live in.
As always, Danez's poems feel urgent, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. It is by far their most experimental collection, and I respect the shit outta that. Danez plays A LOT with form, structure and design in this, though not always successfully it is always refreshing. Bluff collects a photographic collage, a QR code that leads to more unpublished poems online (yes, I've read them all and printed them out, who do you think I am?), poems that are part map, part visual argument, poems that appear in black boxes featuring words freefalling across the page.
If Don't Call Us Dead imagined a place where Black people were "alive / some place better", Bluff explores what happens when you wake up from that fantasy. Danez is more sceptical, more pessimistic, more traumatised.
What I found most refreshing about their newest collection is how self-critical Danez is. They explore openly their own role in the building of this world, this hell, the way they "obeyed its architecture" and "taught its choreography". Holding themself accountable, calling themself out, becoming aware of their own power and doing in those matters. Their candid reflections reverberate far and wide. In one of my favorite poems, "less hope", Danez contends with their own success and how they "made money" from selling optimism to white (and Black) audiences. In "on knowledge", they admit: "my career came on an elegy's back. i made us media, paid the debt with my mind. / i was a prisoner of my own design, helped patent my chain, penned my pen". In "less hope", which is one of my favorite poems from the entire collection, they write:
We also find "new" themes in Bluff (stuff that Danez wasn't willing to share in previous collections), like the domestic abuse their grandmother endured at the hands of their grandfather, or the process of coming out to their brother (immortalised in the iconic poem "Dede was the last person I came out to" which ends with the beautiful lines: "i knew the world & needed this one place in it / not to be it. but then you found my poems. & then / you cut my hair." <3). I always appreciate it when artists are vulnerable and willing to share personal stuff. Danez is a person that feels very close to me. And I'll forever be grateful that they let their readers catch a glimpse.
Not gonna lie, I was a little bit disappointed with their previous collection, Homie. The poems didn't hit the same. Bluff seems to prove that Danez felt a similar way. The new poems are urgent again, Danez is not afraid to share their disillusionment, they're not afraid to be pessimistic. And they are no longer afraid to call for violent action: "if the cops kill me / don't grab your pen / before you find / your matches." Bluff is a gift. I will return to this collection time and time again. <3
i want justice the verb not justice the dreamWritten 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's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their own hometown which saw so much wreckage and upheaval during the past five years. I find it to be their most violent and pessimistic collection.
i want what was promised to me.
In an interview, Danez has said that this fourth collection asks a very specific question: "Bitch, what is poetry?" Is it just art or a tool to aid the liberation of oppressed peoples? Whatever the answer is, Danez knows what poetry cannot do. It cannot feed people. It cannot get people out of jail. It cannot prevent Black people from being shot by the cops. In "volta", Danez bemoans: "this universe my most docile & stunted / weapons rounded into words, my work / so undangerous". If there is one thing I took away from this collection is that action literally speak louder than words. I sympathise with the struggle of a poet who knows their chosen weapon (words) can never be sharp enough for the horrific world we live in.
As always, Danez's poems feel urgent, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. It is by far their most experimental collection, and I respect the shit outta that. Danez plays A LOT with form, structure and design in this, though not always successfully it is always refreshing. Bluff collects a photographic collage, a QR code that leads to more unpublished poems online (yes, I've read them all and printed them out, who do you think I am?), poems that are part map, part visual argument, poems that appear in black boxes featuring words freefalling across the page.
but i don't kill anyone when i shouldBluff is largely located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Danez's home town and where George Floyd was murdered in 2020, and offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it. Through the poems, Danez tackles the entrenched problem of anti-Blackness and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests. They reflect on the chants, the rain, the Target store that was set on fire, the destroyed neighbourhood, the uncertainty of what will be rebuilt in its place; the faux solidarity performed by a nearby brewery that "put up a 8in x 11in printer paper picture of George Floyd up in their half-block of floor-to-ceiling windows I've never seen one of us inside". And so it's more than fitting that the poem "Minneapolis, Saint Paul" ends in the most chilling way: "Money making you forget it's about money. This all started over twenty bucks."
i write & try to hide the world
in a sonnet so no one will kill us
no one will kill us if we are locked inside
a beautiful thing
If Don't Call Us Dead imagined a place where Black people were "alive / some place better", Bluff explores what happens when you wake up from that fantasy. Danez is more sceptical, more pessimistic, more traumatised.
What I found most refreshing about their newest collection is how self-critical Danez is. They explore openly their own role in the building of this world, this hell, the way they "obeyed its architecture" and "taught its choreography". Holding themself accountable, calling themself out, becoming aware of their own power and doing in those matters. Their candid reflections reverberate far and wide. In one of my favorite poems, "less hope", Danez contends with their own success and how they "made money" from selling optimism to white (and Black) audiences. In "on knowledge", they admit: "my career came on an elegy's back. i made us media, paid the debt with my mind. / i was a prisoner of my own design, helped patent my chain, penned my pen". In "less hope", which is one of my favorite poems from the entire collection, they write:
i took the awards & cashed the checks.They apologise for being part of the "joy industrial complex". In "stoop poem", they introduce another layer to this problem: the process of being given the opportunity to publish a book of poems as a Black writer and the reception of your work: "i want to write about my life with my words / the problem is who listening, who editing / who cheers after i kill the children again". I understand why their success, especially among white audiences, took a mental toll on them. It must be hard to bleed on the page, be asked to bleed on the page over and over again, and then have people smile in your face, telling you how brave you are. It is messed up. Artistic resilience ain't no joke, folks.
i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names
for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book,
edited my war cries down to prayers. oh, devil.
they gave me God & gave me clout.
they took my poems & took my blades.
Satan, like you did for God, i sang.
i sang for my enemy, who was my God.
i gave it my best. i bowed, even smiled.
teach me to never bend again.
We also find "new" themes in Bluff (stuff that Danez wasn't willing to share in previous collections), like the domestic abuse their grandmother endured at the hands of their grandfather, or the process of coming out to their brother (immortalised in the iconic poem "Dede was the last person I came out to" which ends with the beautiful lines: "i knew the world & needed this one place in it / not to be it. but then you found my poems. & then / you cut my hair." <3). I always appreciate it when artists are vulnerable and willing to share personal stuff. Danez is a person that feels very close to me. And I'll forever be grateful that they let their readers catch a glimpse.
Not gonna lie, I was a little bit disappointed with their previous collection, Homie. The poems didn't hit the same. Bluff seems to prove that Danez felt a similar way. The new poems are urgent again, Danez is not afraid to share their disillusionment, they're not afraid to be pessimistic. And they are no longer afraid to call for violent action: "if the cops kill me / don't grab your pen / before you find / your matches." Bluff is a gift. I will return to this collection time and time again. <3
Read
December 31, 2024danez rlyyyyyy did it with this one
form!!! goes tf off
form!!! goes tf off
December 29, 2024
Such an amazing, unforgiving collection. Danez Smith never misses, & is such a necessary poet to read! Thanks NetGalley for the arc!
August 28, 2024
These poems exemplify rather than reveal or expose. Feverishly of our unstable political moment, Smith offers a characteristic turn to protest, except now nuancing their narratorial outlook by considering whether or not their poetry and poetry in general operate as action. The answer here is a resounding (verging on Afropessimist) no. Contemporary America is an imperial hellscape, but we seem to be incapable of unlocking the key to progress and some form of equitable utopia. All in all, you go into this expecting something, and you get it, for the most part. Rage, anguish, and a desire to end violence. Though, this anger, for Smith, brings about (uncontested) desires for revenge in response to that which came before. It's honest, but it also lends itself to an issue with this collection overall: a lack of rigor. There's much vulnerability on display, but much of this checks ideological boxes too much for me. I tend to not necessarily adore reading political poetry by those whose views I share, unless their poems surprise me aesthetically or nuance political notions via a truly brilliant or odd use of language. Sadly, I didn't experience this with Smith. I love "love poem" with its gutting ending and sense of pithy yet expansive inquiry. But much of this bores me. These are expressions of suffering and love that often leave me ideologically reiterated and formally cold.
September 26, 2024
Oh, so good! This is one of those reads that calls you out, draws attention, and doesn’t hold back. I found myself highlighting so many sections of this collection of poems. It felt like line after line there was something else—another lesson, another message that I had to hold onto. This book isn’t just social commentary; it’s about injustice, racism, international conflict, and resilience. There are moments that hit you with brute force and others that hold you close. This is the second book of Danez’s that I’ve read, and once again, I’m leaving it feeling satisfied.
Huge thanks to Graywolf Press and Netgalley for the opportunity to experience such a captivating collection.
Huge thanks to Graywolf Press and Netgalley for the opportunity to experience such a captivating collection.
April 22, 2025
3.75
This was only available as an audiobook through my library which is not my preferred format. This is narrated by Danez and I don’t think I would have been able to truly immerse myself in these poems if I would have read it myself instead of listening. Something about their acerbic tone and the way the poems are read tells a story; they come alive. Intergenerational trauma, pessimism v. hope, systemic injustice, are just some of the topics discussed in this collection.
From “Principle”
“I want justice the verb, not justice the dream; I want a nation under a kinder God.”
From “More Hope”
“I know the world we deserve waits for us in a not so distant time.”
This was only available as an audiobook through my library which is not my preferred format. This is narrated by Danez and I don’t think I would have been able to truly immerse myself in these poems if I would have read it myself instead of listening. Something about their acerbic tone and the way the poems are read tells a story; they come alive. Intergenerational trauma, pessimism v. hope, systemic injustice, are just some of the topics discussed in this collection.
From “Principle”
“I want justice the verb, not justice the dream; I want a nation under a kinder God.”
From “More Hope”
“I know the world we deserve waits for us in a not so distant time.”
November 29, 2024
So elegantly done, reads like prayer and elegy and ode all at once. A series of anti poetica and ars america poems reveal Smith’s disillusionment with the neoliberal literary scene and its acceptance of apolitical stasis. Their urgent, fierce voice cements Danez Smith as a poet of vital importance for the present moment. I'm grateful to Graywolf Press for the ARC; available now.
October 11, 2024
Are you guys listening when Danez says, “my prayer: may the world be a Black girl’s cake. my promise: or burn it down.” ???? Like do you hear that
June 17, 2025
Danez Smith, and BLUFF in particular, may have awakened a love of poetry in me. Prior to this, I hadn’t really been able to conceive of poetry as a way to provide social commentary and self-reflection/self-improvement. But Danez Smith has shown me that not only is it possible through poetry, but poetry might be an incredibly moving medium through which to achieve this.
BLUFF, and Danez Smith, is for the politically conscious reader. Smith writes about historical and recent events in American race relations in a multilayered way. Their word choice is suffused with emotion: anger, resentment, rage, doubt… emotions bordering on despair, but just stopping just short.
Smith doesn’t just report on, say, the murder of George Floyd, or the inadequacies of social support during COVID. They also lambast larger, historical patterns that have given rise to America’s legacy of slavery and current state of institutional racial bias:
He also calls out both white and racialized people for our complicity in upholding systemic racism, even when it is to our own detriment:
One of the themes I most appreciated in BLUFF was Smith’s self-reflection on the responsibility and limitations of the artist and their art as part of the revolutionary movement. I appreciated the moments when they’re self-critical of their own past of “selling out” (their own words) in their poetry, of letting their poetry be co-opted to stand for less than what they wanted to say, and their journey to take back self-agency in their writing.
I like this because Smith sets an example of how we can all re-examine our art/content and the extent to which we may be upholding the status quo. They also show us how it’s okay to have believed or supported something at some point in our past, and then to change our minds as we learn more. What’s important is acknowledging our past, and the harms we may have done, and what we’re doing in the present and future to actively combat that harm.
Despite the self- and social critique, BLUFF always remains actively hopeful about the resilience and overall goodness of humanity. Any future we’ve got at saving ourselves and our world will be found in community:
I have now purchased Smith’s poetry backlist, and will be slowly savoring going through them. Thank you, Danez Smith, for showing me how powerfully poetry can carry the important messages of today.
BLUFF, and Danez Smith, is for the politically conscious reader. Smith writes about historical and recent events in American race relations in a multilayered way. Their word choice is suffused with emotion: anger, resentment, rage, doubt… emotions bordering on despair, but just stopping just short.
Smith doesn’t just report on, say, the murder of George Floyd, or the inadequacies of social support during COVID. They also lambast larger, historical patterns that have given rise to America’s legacy of slavery and current state of institutional racial bias:
ask if your country was built off robbed land
& stolen breath (it was), if democracy (your lie) is a leash
tight as new skin around your neck (it chokes)
- “principles”
i’ve never been more afraid
of a white man’s loneliness.
- “it doesn’t feel like a time to write”
He also calls out both white and racialized people for our complicity in upholding systemic racism, even when it is to our own detriment:
Already, the people out of whom capitalism would make an unmemorable meal are flocking to defend the brands…. What America are you mourning? Target wasn’t in the fields, cotton-bloodied hands. Walmart never hung from a tree.
- “Minneapolis, Saint Paul”
One of the themes I most appreciated in BLUFF was Smith’s self-reflection on the responsibility and limitations of the artist and their art as part of the revolutionary movement. I appreciated the moments when they’re self-critical of their own past of “selling out” (their own words) in their poetry, of letting their poetry be co-opted to stand for less than what they wanted to say, and their journey to take back self-agency in their writing.
i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names
for followers. In lieu of action, i wrote a book
edited my war cries down to prayers.
- “less hope”
I like this because Smith sets an example of how we can all re-examine our art/content and the extent to which we may be upholding the status quo. They also show us how it’s okay to have believed or supported something at some point in our past, and then to change our minds as we learn more. What’s important is acknowledging our past, and the harms we may have done, and what we’re doing in the present and future to actively combat that harm.
Despite the self- and social critique, BLUFF always remains actively hopeful about the resilience and overall goodness of humanity. Any future we’ve got at saving ourselves and our world will be found in community:
eden is an action
a we
- “soon”
I have now purchased Smith’s poetry backlist, and will be slowly savoring going through them. Thank you, Danez Smith, for showing me how powerfully poetry can carry the important messages of today.
November 9, 2024
A lot of experimentation. A lot of typological games. A lot of boredom.
May 19, 2025
A glorious collection!
February 19, 2025
I’m so glad I made this my first read of 2025.
Danez Smith the person(I don’t know their pronouns) you are👏🏼 Beautifully done, this book felt so raw, emotional and personal. I loved every second of it.
Danez Smith the person(I don’t know their pronouns) you are👏🏼 Beautifully done, this book felt so raw, emotional and personal. I loved every second of it.
April 28, 2024
I’ll come back to this collection time and time again — the power that Smith writes with is devastating & inspring. Unique exploration of identity and protest and space. Highly recommend.
September 15, 2024
Unable to put this down. Standouts for me were: “Minneapolis, Saint Paul”, “I-35W North // Downtown Exits”, “& Dayton’s Bluff”!
Read
December 1, 2024My first read-through wasn't as deliberate as it could have been, so I'm excited to keep re-visiting it. Overarching thought is that I was very enamored with the use of visual poetics!! Danez Smith you will always be famous
March 9, 2025
I have two recommendations... okay, maybe it's three.
If you plan to read this collection of poems, read it in hardback and not in an electronic form (unless that form preserves the poet's intended presentation). Formatting matters so much. The spacing, the line breaks and positioning. It all matters a great deal. I have 20-some highlights but they do not do justice to how Smith meant them to be.
If you plan to read this collection, read one poem at a time. Then stop. Let it digest in your soul and reverberate in your heart.
If you are considering this title, read it. Just pick it up and be with it and enjoy it.
Danez has a tender, rageful, bittersweet voice. The longing for justice, for peace, for a man, for some understanding of this world's chaos, etc. is profound. It's heartbreaking. His words and how they are constructed together are a wondrous thing. I'm moved and hurt and overwhelmed.
Danez is able to touch another person across space and time. It's a marvel and it's the reason I read: to be held by another's words. It's an intimate act.
If you plan to read this collection of poems, read it in hardback and not in an electronic form (unless that form preserves the poet's intended presentation). Formatting matters so much. The spacing, the line breaks and positioning. It all matters a great deal. I have 20-some highlights but they do not do justice to how Smith meant them to be.
If you plan to read this collection, read one poem at a time. Then stop. Let it digest in your soul and reverberate in your heart.
If you are considering this title, read it. Just pick it up and be with it and enjoy it.
Danez has a tender, rageful, bittersweet voice. The longing for justice, for peace, for a man, for some understanding of this world's chaos, etc. is profound. It's heartbreaking. His words and how they are constructed together are a wondrous thing. I'm moved and hurt and overwhelmed.
Danez is able to touch another person across space and time. It's a marvel and it's the reason I read: to be held by another's words. It's an intimate act.
June 6, 2024
Danez Smith s'ho qüestiona tot. A Bluff, entre altres coses, fa una revisió de molts dels temes i conceptes tractats en les seves col·leccions anteriors. I, sobretot, reflexiona sobre la pròpia poesia.
És increïble, venint com ve de dos llibres com son Don't Call Us Dead i Homie, que segueixi experimentant tant formal com temàticament, i que ho faci de manera tan meravellosa, a través d'una col·lecció llarga, complexa i unificada
Aquí hi trobem imatges, diagrames, sextines, prosa poètica, assaig... Hi ha un poema quasi en forma de dietari sobre les protestes després de l'assassinat de George Floyd, ars poètiques i anti poètiques. Potser és la col·lecció on la veu de Danez Smith es mostra més reflexiva, on la sents discutir-se amb ella mateixa davant dels teus ulls.
Hi ha moltes coses.
És increïble, venint com ve de dos llibres com son Don't Call Us Dead i Homie, que segueixi experimentant tant formal com temàticament, i que ho faci de manera tan meravellosa, a través d'una col·lecció llarga, complexa i unificada
Aquí hi trobem imatges, diagrames, sextines, prosa poètica, assaig... Hi ha un poema quasi en forma de dietari sobre les protestes després de l'assassinat de George Floyd, ars poètiques i anti poètiques. Potser és la col·lecció on la veu de Danez Smith es mostra més reflexiva, on la sents discutir-se amb ella mateixa davant dels teus ulls.
Hi ha moltes coses.
October 16, 2024
i love how they used the pages visually
October 7, 2024
I read “Homie” a while back after a friend recommended it to me and loved it so I was excited to see that Smith had a new collection out.
This book is immensely powerful and I think it’s funny that “Citizen” is referenced because I would definitely consider a lot of this lyric prose. Regardless, the content is outstandingly explored in such rich and stark language.
Coming from Minneapolis, Smith expertly unpacks the last few years of trauma, harkening back to the slave trade and weaving in familial trauma as well.
Some of the sexual themes didn’t sit right with me, but overall this book is so important and relevant—a really gorgeous example of what good can come out of the truly horrible.
This book is immensely powerful and I think it’s funny that “Citizen” is referenced because I would definitely consider a lot of this lyric prose. Regardless, the content is outstandingly explored in such rich and stark language.
Coming from Minneapolis, Smith expertly unpacks the last few years of trauma, harkening back to the slave trade and weaving in familial trauma as well.
Some of the sexual themes didn’t sit right with me, but overall this book is so important and relevant—a really gorgeous example of what good can come out of the truly horrible.
December 12, 2024
“there i was, writing anthems in a nation whose victory was my blood
made visible, mama too sugared to weep without melting, my rage
fed their comfort foaming from my racial mouth, singing
gospel for a god they beat me into loving. Lord
your tomorrow holds no sway, your heaven too late.”
Danez Smith is the defining poet of this generation. their play with form is inventive, their language is irresistible, their voice is hungry, fresh, blessed and unwavering. realer than real, stronger than strong, mighty and forceful, rich in soul and sexuality and love. their bravery seeps through the page, each imprint of ink their very own. they celebrate culture and shout aloud the racial horrors it owns. they sing songs and chastise that music. they unfold on the page, but ALWAYS find their way back home.
made visible, mama too sugared to weep without melting, my rage
fed their comfort foaming from my racial mouth, singing
gospel for a god they beat me into loving. Lord
your tomorrow holds no sway, your heaven too late.”
Danez Smith is the defining poet of this generation. their play with form is inventive, their language is irresistible, their voice is hungry, fresh, blessed and unwavering. realer than real, stronger than strong, mighty and forceful, rich in soul and sexuality and love. their bravery seeps through the page, each imprint of ink their very own. they celebrate culture and shout aloud the racial horrors it owns. they sing songs and chastise that music. they unfold on the page, but ALWAYS find their way back home.
November 28, 2025
I'm going to reread this over the next week or so, and will revisit this rating, but my initial take is that there's a 5-star book in here that is brought down to 4 by the length of the book and some less good poems within that length. It's the classic double album problem. That said, the high points are very high--Smith has not lost their touch.
Upon the aforementioned reread:
It's clearer upon a reread that Smith is doing something more ambitious with this collection that I could see on the first read. I still think that parts of the middle drag a bit, but they show me how it all fits into the constellation they are building with the last few poems. The final 3 poems are among the strongest they have written, especially "soon," which was a highlight the first time through but even better in the context of the reread.
Even though there were moments in the reread when I was wondering if I liked the book at all, my sense upon finishing it is that it is a major work, perhaps just one that is less excerptable than most poetry collections are at this point. I'm moving my rating to 5 stars, but I think that this isn't the Smith to start with. That's still Homie.
Upon the aforementioned reread:
It's clearer upon a reread that Smith is doing something more ambitious with this collection that I could see on the first read. I still think that parts of the middle drag a bit, but they show me how it all fits into the constellation they are building with the last few poems. The final 3 poems are among the strongest they have written, especially "soon," which was a highlight the first time through but even better in the context of the reread.
Even though there were moments in the reread when I was wondering if I liked the book at all, my sense upon finishing it is that it is a major work, perhaps just one that is less excerptable than most poetry collections are at this point. I'm moving my rating to 5 stars, but I think that this isn't the Smith to start with. That's still Homie.
February 10, 2025
very 2020 (derogatory).
ironically i guess i read don’t call us dead for the first time in 2020, and it felt so fresh and creative and powerful then, which held up on a second reading more recently. danez smith’s feelings of hopelessness in bluff are valid and relatable, but that doesn’t make their poems about it very good :(
ironically i guess i read don’t call us dead for the first time in 2020, and it felt so fresh and creative and powerful then, which held up on a second reading more recently. danez smith’s feelings of hopelessness in bluff are valid and relatable, but that doesn’t make their poems about it very good :(
January 10, 2025
Read as an audiobook which has probably skewed my rating—though I’m not sure in which direction.
August 6, 2025
Urgent and breathtaking. Not shying away from complicity, yet interrogates poetry and frankly all art as a means of salvation. Will be rereading this for the rest of my life.
August 18, 2025
Not my favorite compared to Danez's other collections, but I also think their craft is so good that some things go over my head.
June 27, 2025
If you're ever feeling tired of the current political state, I cannot recommend this collection enough. It's a needed reminder that we can't be tired, we have to act
January 18, 2025
there is one particular ars poetica on page 119 with the last lines, "which means there is still time to make more alive / which means there is still poetry" that is the text for me
April 29, 2024
Graywolf was kind enough to pass this along as an advance copy for their donors (if you donate on a monthly basis they send galleys to you), and I ended up tearing through this in the space of an afternoon. Seeing Danez reckon with their own emotions around the George Floyd protests and pandemic, and further fucking with poetry forms and formatting as they do so, is a great time. It's a fantastic read, and comes out this August - preorder it!
November 3, 2024
HOLY FUCK. It's sosososososo good.
Each new book tops their last. A particular favorite piece in here is "Soon".
Every poem I've ever read of Danez's is a love poem, in that every poem, no matter the tone or the contents, contains underneath this deep seated sense of love. Love that is angry, love that sees us for our complexities, love that fights hard for us while wanting to keep itself soft enough to lean on. This book is no different.
In this book, they wrestle with the feelings so many of us have: how the fuck do we burn it all down &and what of the future -how do we build it? What does it look like?
Each new book tops their last. A particular favorite piece in here is "Soon".
Every poem I've ever read of Danez's is a love poem, in that every poem, no matter the tone or the contents, contains underneath this deep seated sense of love. Love that is angry, love that sees us for our complexities, love that fights hard for us while wanting to keep itself soft enough to lean on. This book is no different.
In this book, they wrestle with the feelings so many of us have: how the fuck do we burn it all down &and what of the future -how do we build it? What does it look like?
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