Danez Smith

Homie is not the title Danez Smith gave the book. The word on the cover stands in for a different one, used between friends, which the poet chose not to hand to every reader, and the poems inside are about friendship as the thing that keeps a person alive when family, country and lover have all fallen short. Graywolf published it in 2020. Smith is a Black, queer, HIV-positive poet from St. Paul, Minnesota, who uses they and them, came up through the Dark Noise collective and the slam circuit, and reads the work aloud as a matter of course. Don't Call Us Dead, from 2017, was among the finalists for the National Book Award and won the Forward Prize for best collection in Britain, the first American to take it. Bluff followed in 2024. The poems are formally restless and often funny, and the funniness is doing serious work.