The Brooklyn Rail

When Danez Smith published their previous collection of poems, Homie (or, My Nig, depending on who your people are), in January of 2020, they couldn't have had any idea what would soon come. Or—they could, and they couldn’t altogether. A global pandemic surely took us all by surprise, but Black men are killed by the state almost every day in America. Although for the fire to descend on their own hometown of the Twin Cities, their community’s wail heard across borders, moving a historic mass to break from assumed isolation to join in the virulent funeral procession; that may have come as a shock—the outrage, and that they would find themselves at the center of it all, thrust forward as its witness.

It was in this crucible following the murder of George Floyd, among so many others, that Smith began to pen what would soon coalesce into their fourth and most reflective poetry collection, Bluff. Bluff is a sharply-focused feat, meditating on grief, home, the next world—both here and thereafter—and most unexpectedly, guilt.

i agreed / to the kill. i’m full grown. taxes paid. i built the bomb.

Bluff’s consistent throughline is Smith’s arduous grappling with what it means to be an American. And even further, to be a Black American. Critique of institutions and elegies for our dead are common themes in Smith’s prior collections, Don’t Call Us Dead and My Nig. However, where Bluff departs from Smith’s earlier tradition—marking what may be a new chapter in their poetic approach—is its unflinching exploration of complicity in cyclical trauma and the discomfort of breaking from it. Multiple references to taxes, “knowing where the funds go,” or insufficient protest seem to weigh heavy on Smith’s mind, complicated by a history of lynchings, displacement, and enslavement. What does it mean to be both abused and the abuser at one time? In “The Last Black American Poem,” Smith paints a weighted image:

We buried my grandpa with an Obama button / Pinned to his lapel. Finally free, we sent him to heaven / American.

It’s a challenging read, and deeply uncomfortable at times. I’m not sure that I’ve come across a collection before that has stared back at me so accusingly, so sure that I’d blink first. Though Smith’s delivery is rooted in a self-awareness that makes clear that they still remain in motion along the cycle of grief—still confused, still spiraling, still learning. Bluff is intentionally self-referential in that regard, pointing to Smith’s literary past to beg forgiveness for what they’d now read as their own complicity in the fire that would soon come. In 2020, Smith opened My Nig with a poem, “my president,” crowing their loved ones in similar style to Zoe Leonard’s I want a president (1992). The opener was a sprawling one, certainly matching the spirit of that time, months ahead of an electoral revolt against then-President Donald Trump. “my president” elevated everyone from family, to literary contemporaries, to Rihanna atop the pedestal of authority—declaring their shine to be rightly American. However, it's in Bluff’s “The Last Black American Poem,” that Smith closes with: “Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.”

Smith is unafraid of contradicting themselves; they aren’t too proud to show us their meandering as they sort through the chaos of four hundred years, compressed into a few boiling summer weeks in the city that they’ve crowned home. Sorting through piling burials and countless poems to eulogize them, Smith wants a new nation, one that “treats my mama right”; and at the same time detests nationhood altogether, calling for a murder of even “the state / within me.” They zero in on their most dependable tool, the pen, and rail against poetry itself, at the same time honoring the power of language while detesting its limits and its insufficiency. What is a poem when the streets demand your fire?

At its heart, Bluff is a call to action. Smith will continue writing, because to write is to dream. Bluff’s damning accusations are necessary, as is its insistence that we can be redeemed, that we do redeem. Our love may not be enough to liberate us, but it is something. And if anything, it's through our love—our maddening, riotous love—that we can begin to develop a clarity needed to dream up a liberatory future, and can tend to the revolt in us needed to realize it.

There is a poem in the pillar of smoke overhead the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct: an unrealized vision underhand, and in the wind’s spirited direction, a pointed finger aimed toward oasis. To get there, we must first walk through the flame.

let us not be scared of the work / because it’s hard / let us move the mountain / because the mountain must move.

Bluff is the reckoning we’ve been looking for.