Bluff: Poems - The Poetry Shop

Bluff: Poems

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Bluff: Poems - The Poetry Shop
  • Bluff: Poems - The Poetry Shop
Bluff: Poems

Graywolf Press

Bluff: Poems

$18.00
$18.00 $23.00
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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.

Book Details

ISBN:
9781644452981
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
160
Authors:
Danez Smith
Published Date:
2024-08-20
Language:
English

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About Danez Smith

Author of Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award, Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Their debut, [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. A third collection, Homie (Graywolf, 2020), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A founding member of the Dark Noise Collective, Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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