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Lambeth

Danez Smith: Bluff

Saturday 26 October

Join us for an event celebrating the searing new poetry collection from the Forward Prize-winning American poet with a devoted online and international following.

 

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.

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