they gave me God & gave me clout.
they took my poems & took my blades.
Satan, like you did for God, i sang.
i sang for my enemy, who was my God.
i gave it my best. i bowed &, worse, smiled.
teach me to never bend again.
From “less hope”
Bluff offers an intimate and innovative rebuke of the writing industry as award-winning author Danez Smith comes to terms with both the power and limits of poetry as an act of resistance. This is Smith at their absolute best, and also at their most vulnerable. The poems in Bluff are, at times, complex; Smith extends their affair with conceptual poetry and materiality, pushing white and black space on the page to their absolute limits without ever compromising the accessibility and honesty for which Smith is best known. And while Bluff highlights Smith’s growth, poetically and personally, it retains their trademark lyricism, irreverent humor, and an insistence on joy.
Danez Smith signaled themselves as a skilled practitioner of textuality and material poetics in Homie, a collection which repeatedly layers and arranges text in strange, unfamiliar configurations as they confront White supremacy, HIV-infection, and anti-Blackness. In their more recent collection, Bluff, Smith amplifies their experimentation, visually, structurally, and linguistically mirroring their disillusionment with art as activism. This disillusionment is made plain in the opening poem, “anti poetica,” which presents a litany of critiques to the function of poetry in times of crisis. The speaker laments, “there is no poem free from money’s ruin” and “no poem to admonish the state / no poem with a key to the locks / no poem to free you.” Smith’s “anti poetica” primes readers for a collection which is at odds with itself, poems which question their efficacy and their importance, but also for a series of poems which disrupts the reader visually and appropriates the material as a site of resistance.
“On Knowledge,” for example, spans nine pages, each containing stark, imposing black squares and limited text. As readers move through the poem, the position of both the black space and the text shift, building toward the seventh page, where the text moves outside the black square entirely as the speaker proclaims, “i had to break out my mind / to get it back, i needed to / see the words in the light.” The eight page moves text back inside the black space, though Smith now presents two overlapping black squares that highlight the growing separation between conscious and unconscious action. The ninth page returns to a single black square, including just two lines of text: “i said the quiet part/ aloud / i rehearsed my action” (15). Smith contains all of the text inside the black square, save the word “action,” communicating Smith’s dissatisfaction with “action” as a theoretical or cognitive process in favor of action that occurs “in the light,” action that is visible and exposed.
“Rondo” takes Smith’s experimentation with materiality and meaning even further as they critique city planners’ decision to disrupt a Black community for the sake of efficiency. The poem begins with two sections of text lifted from outside sources, one attributed to Earl Wilkins in The St. Paul Echo and the other attributed to the Gale Family Library. These two blurbs provide context for the construction of I-94, which the city built “right through the heart of the Rondo neighborhood” despite intense opposition from the residents of the Rondo community. The poem continues for six pages, each of which makes use of material space to demonstrate the forced displacement of the Rondo community. The layout of the poem within the collection plays a central role in our understanding of the poem’s materiality, as Smith extends a strip of black across the pages to represent the incursion of I-94.
Of course, Bluff is not limited to conceptualist poems. Many poems take recognizable shape and prioritize the lyric, yet even these more visually traditional poems are noticeably metacognitive. “i’m not bold i’m fucking traumatized” features a speaker who confronts the reality that “the people / in my poems don’t agree with my ways” and admits,
when my heart feels placed
in a blender & left to wait to pulse
that’s what it feel like, feel like
when i remember who want me gone
& how i love them alive.
“Colorado Springs” pleads, “violence, don’t lust after our boys & call it kin. if you must find our babies in the midst / of their lives, leave a wound we can dress,” while “Sioux Falls” laments, “how dare i love you here in the evidence of evil / how dare i want you where greed led west to rob beauty.” At every turn, it is clear that Smith approaches the poems in Bluff from a place of personal accountability, generously exposing their internal conflict as a mechanism to prompt self-reflection in the reader.
I am going on record—Bluff is the best collection of the year, and the best collection Danez Smith has ever written. These are poems you are going to want to share with everyone you know, and everyone you don’t.