Danez Smith: Bluff

Bluff is a new collection about the year that the world’s gaze turned to Minneapolis – Smith’s own home.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the Covid-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown.

This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to ‘anti poetica’ and ‘ars america’ to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism.

A brilliant long poem maps the history of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighbourhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a manifesto about artistic resilience when the places we most love – those given and made – are burning. In this collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, Quiet, won the Folio Prize for Poetry and the John Pollard Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.