Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bluff: Poems

Bluff: Poems

Smith, Danez

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1644452987
ISBN13: 9781644452981
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: Aug 20 2024
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.41 Width: 7.07 Depth: 8.91
Language: English
Awards: ALA Notable Books, Pulitzer Prize

Danez is a local poet, and writes poems that I think are accessible for new poetry readers without compromising complexity or rigor or breadth. They are one of the poets I would often give to my undergrads who were making the jump from self-published/celebrity/instagram poets to poets who actually read books. This collection also meditates on Minneapolis in 2020, so I think it feels particularly personal to those of us who were here during that time - through pandemic, uprising, and the community conversation around abolition and care frameworks. -Sophia

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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