Bluff (ePub)

'A writer who never loses their way' New York Times

A searing new collection from the Forward prizewinning American poet, about the year that the world turned to Minneapolis - Smith's hometown - and Smith was forced to reckon with their own responsibility as a writer.

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 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 brilliant long poem maps the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighbourhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, 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 writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be' Raven Leilani on Homie