Danez Smith’s collection opens with a sequence imagining an afterlife reserved for Black men killed by police, portraying a realm where childhood innocence is restored and bodily safety is guaranteed. The poems confront the physical realities of the HIV-positive experience, documenting the cellular shifts and social stigmas that accompany the virus. Smith uses the imagery of white blood cells as soldiers and the landscape of the American Midwest to map the intersections of racial violence and chronic illness. The text employs inventive typography and shifts in scale to examine how a body survives under the pressure of state surveillance and biological vulnerability.
Readers of contemporary political poetry and queer literature turn to this work to understand the specific anxiety of living in a body targeted by both systemic prejudice and pathogens. It serves those interested in how linguistic structures can represent internal health data alongside public mourning. The reader leaves with a direct perspective on the labor required to sustain joy while navigating a healthcare system and a legal framework that frequently fail to protect marginalized lives. It provides a technical and emotional vocabulary for the reality of endurance in the face of mortality.
- Published
- 2017
- Language
- EN
