Danez Smith's ‘Don't Call Us Dead’ Is My Favorite Book Of Poetry
it's like trayvon suddenly reappearing in amber light, telling emmett i got this while waving him away, further into the remains of the day. candy sweet with non-hooded eyes, this trayvon here would be full of memory and motion and quite willing to explain a few things. primary amongst them being a black boy’s imagination having the tendency to lash not out but in, all while having to linger, type livid, on his own tongue. livid due to imagination being a boxed in ring where said black boy is from, and his screams are loud enough to unearth floyd patterson given the black sonny liston-size fist of a white world feverishly pressed into his lungs. thus, he may or may not breathe so easily running to freedom, but certainly never to glory. given that, we should all be on the lookout for the black boy with the monumental exit but no origin story.
mike bring your big ass ova’ here and say something to these people ‘cause they getting on my nerves! a once sweet but now bitter trayvon would probably yell to mike. mike, brown and buoyant as ever, pluperfect in a place between dreams. and under a cinematic moon whose beams wrangle the tides of a merciless sea mike, with balls of light for eyes, would probably speak on how the blue-eyed, brick and mortar of sunlight is oppressively blinding. and when a big black boy such as himself is unable to see, he collides with the world. his legacy, a primal scream of a searchlight perpetually searching for what his old life before his new life was meant to unfurl.
and with a merciful tongue that can seductively shape silence to fit what dead black boys with balls of light for eyes can actually grow to be, big mike has grown that much bigger since his death and in doing so, i can see him having promised trayvon to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the next dead, growing black boy leading from before before to before after. from everything to everything else. from exile to eden. from hemlock to honey. from lion’s mouth to self-recovery. from standing stone to unwithered becoming. from lovelorn to brightwarm. from scratched ceiling to sky. from impulse to grace. from open wound to open space. from not having to having a face with the audacity to actually require, not less, but more light. the audacity of dead black boys who actually require more life.
John Gavin White is a poet and essayist whose writings combine philosophy, narrative and lyric to explore the historical erasure of black male vulnerability against the backdrop of oppression. White centers this in what he deems "the lived philosophy of the poetic," which is any attempt at the unified treatment of emotion, logic, language and thought against the backdrop of oppression. White was the Inaugural Writer-In-Residence for the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University / Express Newark, along with a 2024 Furious Flower Conference featured poet, a 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet, and 2021 Frost Place and Button Poetry Chapbook Finalist. He is a two time Apollo Amateur Night Night winner, and has performed or lectured at a number of institutions in the U.S. and abroad, ranging from Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History to Queen University Belfast in Ireland, to the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. His debut poetry collection, "I, John de Conqueror: A New Spelling Of My Name," is available from Spuyten Duyvil Publishing.