The American poet’s dark, politically conscious fourth collection tackles the entrenched problem of anti-blackness and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests
Danez Smith is one of the most important American poets of our age. Bluff is the non-binary author’s fourth collection and, as Smith said in a recent interview with author Alexander Chee, it asks a very specific question: “Bitch, what is poetry?” Is it an individualist project or a tool to aid the liberation of oppressed peoples? Whatever the answer, Smith is clear about what poetry cannot do. “There is no poem greater than feeding someone,” the first verse, anti poetica, begins, one of three poems with that title in this book.
Bluff is largely located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is Smith’s home town and where George Floyd was murdered in 2020. The author takes us through the events and protests that followed Floyd’s killing in the expansive reportage-style poem Minneapolis, Saint Paul. Smith reflects on the chants, the rain, the Target store that was set on fire. They ponder the aftermath of the protests, the destroyed neighbourhood, the uncertainty of what will be rebuilt in its place; the faux solidarity performed by a nearby brewery that “put up a 8in x 11in printer paper picture of George Floyd up in their half-block of floor-to-ceiling windows I’ve never seen one of us inside”. The poem bulges with questions. “What America are you mourning”; “Why do we have police?”
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