Name: Bluff
ISBN: 9781644452981

Danez Smith

Poems

Bluff

biddy

who cares how long i've with my poems – those shit palms those rats of my soul. (...) i'm not revolutionary / i'm regular

danez smith's bluff is a collection that never, not for a second, not on a single page/stanza/line confuses what a poem can be with what poetry is. what a poem can be: anything. everything. rebuke form, build your own, rebuke syntax, find your own language. fill the page. empty it. the poem isn't just words but pictures but shapes but a qr code but spanning 10 pages, or 20, if you like it to, if it must. say what you must. say what you/yours couldn't. tell me those dreams and hopes and fears and truths. oh, but never forget what poetry is: the living and the dead, the trees and the birds, grief and loss and hope and war and revolution, especially revolution. the gun itself and not the poem with a gun. the blood itself and not the bleeding poem. the love itself and not the love poem. not the poem about liberation, but the liberation itself. not the poem. poetry. I mean, yea, what the fuck. startling and entirely, absolutely itself, smith's bluff is just, so unrelentingly clear and delicious, would eat this collection if it made me a fraction as deliberate as smith was in these poems

Bluff Poems

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