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Danez Smith is the author of Homie (2020) and Don't Call Us Dead (2018), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Four Quartets Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Award. They live in Minneapolis.
Much of Smith's early success came through the slam poetry scene... Homie makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page -- Kevin Okoth * London Review of Books * A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all -- Maria Crawford * Financial Times, *Books of the Year* * Homie is deeply moving and funny... [and] a step change from Smith's earlier work -- Lanre Bakare * Guardian * Homie is how we survive - in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt -- Tish Jones This book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly -- Fatimah Asghar, author of If They Come For Us Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it's here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they've built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us -- Franny Choi, author of Soft Science A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness. * Guardian * I'd like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith's work. I'd like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass - provided by friends, influences, collaborators - stays steady. -- Parul Sehgal * New York Times *
