Danez Smith’s Ecstatic Body Language

In “Don’t Call Us Dead,” the poet brings the unruly power of performance to the written word.
Smith has a rare talent for mapping the body and its authority onto the page.Illustration by Rune Fisker

The American poet Danez Smith’s third book, “Don’t Call Us Dead” (Graywolf), opens with “summer, somewhere,” a stunning elegy that contains a tense refusal:

somewhere, a sun. below, boys brown
as rye play the dozens & ball, jump

in the air & stay there. boys become new
moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise

-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least
spit back a father or two. i won’t get started.

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

Starting without having “started,” Smith’s lines suggest the discourses that they suspend. History “is what it is,” since it can’t be changed. Even though “it knows what it did,” it’s like a stubborn child: nobody can coax it into confessing. These phrases cut in all kinds of directions, threatening the exasperated truce that they establish. A history that “is what it is” doesn’t sound like it can be so blithely dismissed; “i won’t get started,” in the context of an elegy about murdered black boys, is what you say when you’ve had to point out the obvious too many times. These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination.

Smith’s work is about that imagination—its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable. Poets, very broadly speaking, are sometimes disparaged as solo fliers, and few as idiosyncratic as Smith want to bend their gifts to the thriving of nonliterary communities. Smith, who is African-American, H.I.V.-positive, and genderqueer, goes by plural pronouns. Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. Smith’s style has a foot in slam and spoken word, scenes that reach people who might not buy a slim volume of poems. But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. And they are, in their cadences and management of lines, deeply literary. In the poem above, with its ampersands and strong enjambments, its knowing alliterative excesses, I hear Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest who jury-rigged his verse to express personal turmoil, and Hart Crane, whose gentleness was expressed in an American idiom full of thunderclap, and Allen Ginsberg, who loved and learned from them both. The addition of Smith’s star turns a random cluster of points into a constellation, the way new work of this calibre always does.

At the center of many of these poems is the black queer body as it moves through a range of contemporary American spaces, some comparatively safe, many potentially lethal. The mind that tracks it—imagining its outcomes, adjusting to its setbacks, processing its sudden drives and imperatives—is a wild and unpredictable instrument. In an extraordinary poem about sex and death, “strange dowry,” Smith finds themselves in a strobe-lit bar, checked out by potential lovers. Here is the poem’s opening:

bloodwife they whisper when i raise my hand for another rum coke
the ill savior of my veins proceeds me, my digital honesty about what
queer bacteria dotted my blood with snake mist & shatter potions
they stare at my body, off the app, unpixelated & poison pretty flesh
men leave me be, i dance with the ghost i came here with
a boy with three piercings & muddy eyes smiles & disappears into the strobes
the light spits him out near my ear, against my slow & practiced grind

Once “off the app”—a proxy that stipulates the precise terms of erotic transaction—we’re in a whirlwind with the ill but “pretty” body at its center. The “snake mist & shatter potions” of H.I.V. mean that a person is, for that evening and in that bar, the poison in his blood. The “boy with three piercings” is in the same boat, and so the night becomes “cum wonder & blood hallelujah” before, in the morning, a cruel “seven emails: meeting, junk, rejection, junk, blood work results.” Many poets would end the poem after the elation, or moralize the morning after. Smith gives us the whole arc of the experience, in a language whose pleasure shines through even the bleakest details.

Spontaneity is the great virtue of this work, but calculation is a survival skill. The open-endedness of “strange dowry” is matched, in this book, by a grim determinism. In “it won’t be a bullet,” Smith’s advantages over “the kind of black man who dies on the news” are offset by H.I.V., which targets black men by a different standard of intention:

in the catalogue of ways to kill a black boy, find me
buried between the pages stuck together
with red stick. ironic, predictable. look at me.

The ghastly alternative to turning up “on the news” is to be “buried,” the way the classifieds or the obits are “buried” in the paper, in a “catalogue” of potential deaths. An individuated life, complete with choices that feel like one’s own, isn’t a possibility: Smith is waiting to be used, discarded, and forgotten by a reader who gets off on the death models in the back of the book.

The word “boy”—sometimes sexualized, sometimes not, but always uttered with a kind of tragic holiness and reverence—chimes throughout these poems. A boy’s will is the wind’s will, according to Longfellow, in a gorgeous phrase that Robert Frost adapted for the title of his first book. That dream of waywardness is liable to get a black boy killed, but Smith’s imagination operates as though it still exists somewhere. The elegy that opens the book, “summer, somewhere,” after it benches history, suggests a ritual in which martyred boys can “say our own names when we pray.” Guarded by prayer, simple acts of innocence become, again, plausible: “we go out for sweets & come back.”

I hope this book brings fans of Smith’s astonishing performances, all readily available online, to the printed page. Smith’s performance of their poem “dear white america” was a viral hit, viewed by more than three hundred thousand people after it was featured on the “PBS NewsHour.” It’s a prose poem; I might not have guessed. How to convert that performance to the page, when so much of its power rests in Smith’s delivery? In this moving, unsettling work, the question is not simply one of craft. It’s about how the body and its authority can be manifested in writing, with only the spindly trace of letters to stand in for it. What does written poetry do that spoken word cannot? For one thing, it forces you, the reader, to say aloud, to embody, the words, while leaving a gap for the inevitable differences of race or gender identity, of illness and health, that might sometimes seem unbridgeable. They might be unbridgeable; but they are not unimaginable. ♦