Don't Call Us Dead
Black queer life, HIV, police violence. Smith writes with urgency and music that demands to be read aloud.
Even admirers say the book lands unevenly poem to poem. One 3-star reviewer named 'Dinosaurs in the Hood' and 'Every Day is a Funeral & a Miracle' as the pieces that worked for her while others in the collection didn't. A Kenyon Review critic prefers pieces that “pulse with the rhythms and assertiveness one expects from poetry slams” over the more directly self-affirming lines, the ones stating outright that the speaker is beautiful and lovable and enough, calling those comparatively weaker next to the book's sharper, image-driven passages. The scattered, stacked typography in 'litany with blood all over' reads as unclear to at least one reader even as others praise the same formal choice. The subject matter sits unrelentingly close, where a critic notes “plague and genocide meet on a line in my body,” and at least one reader names that closeness as a real source of discomfort even while crediting the book's aim.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
