Bluff

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 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 neighbourhood 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.