Danez Smith's 'Don't Call Us Dead' contains one of the most breathtaking poems you read all year

Midway through their poem, “summer, somewhere,” Danez Smith offers a vision of utopia: “Paradise is a world where everything/ is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.”

The poem, the opening of Smith’s National Book Award-nominated collection Don’t Call Us Dead, is a 25-page long elegy to the boys who were killed, in which the narrator envisions an afterlife in which these boys, vulnerable in life, have now found peace and power. 

“Now, everywhere i am is/ the center of everything. I must/ be the lord of something. What was i before? a boy? a son?/ a warning? a myth? i whistled/ now i’m the god of whistling,” writes Smith. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | Danez Smith's 'Don't Call Us Dead' contains one of the most breathtaking poems you read all year