A review by laura_sackton
Bluff: Poems by Danez Smith

This is an incredible collection. It is about police violence, especially in the Twin Cities during covid, it is about the burning world and living in the burning world. It is about moments of sweetness, it is about climate change and grief and what it means that the world is ending, and mostly, for me, it is about poetry. How can it matter. How it matters. Does it matter. It is. 

Over and over in these poems Smith rejects poetry. They write about how poetry will not save us, how poems are love, are not solutions, are not material. There are so many poems about what they have gotten wrong in poems, how they hide in poems, how instead of doing poems pick up the weapons. Poem after poem reckons with the futility of poems. 

And yet. Poems. A whole book of poems. It’s hard to say what I mean but this is a book that directly confronts the failure of poetry, and goes on making poems anyway. Poetry is alive and it is here and it is fucked and it is beautiful. There's no lesson or moral. Smith does not offer a cohesive philosophy of poetry or living or queerness or Blackness or resistance or joy. Their form, their craft, their heart, the world, poetry itself—is way too big and messy for that. 

This is not an easy or simple book in any way. There are no answers. No one is let off the hook. There is only the trying, the journey, the ongoing. It’s hard to explain how much of an impact this book had on me, the sitting inside this impossible paradox and just saying, okay, here it is. We go on living. 

Absolute brilliance, can’t wait to read it again.