Description
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.
Description
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.
Staff Reviews:
Margaux says: One thing I love about Danez Smith's writing is that it always feels like an experience; something you have to read to believe. I recommend BLUFF if you're into socially/politically conscious, urgently scrutinous poetry. If that sounds like your kind of thing, this is the collection for you.
— Staff
Jen says...Inventive, furious, and hopeful, Smith's third collection grapples with institutional violence against Black Americans while pushing the reader to imagine a potential future divorced from our present's ugliest defining features. This is poetry that meets and subsequently transcends the current moment. A must-read if there ever was one.
— Staff
