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Bluff

Bluff

A powerful new collection reckoning with America, protest and poetry itself

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

A searing new collection from the Forward Prize-winning American poet about the year that the world’s gaze turned to Minneapolis – Smith's own home.

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 epicentre 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. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards 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 Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighbourhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a manifesto about artistic resilience when the places we most love – those given and made – are burning. In this collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

‘A writer who never loses their way’ New York Times


© Danez Smith 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024

Reviews

  • 'Smith’s interrogation of poetry’s complicity in suffering is expressed in brilliantly crafted, rhythmically complex verse'
    Rebecca Tamás, Guardian

About the author

Danez Smith

Danez Smith is the author of Homie (2020) and Don’t Call Us Dead (2018), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Four Quartets Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Award. They live in Minneapolis.
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