Amanda Gorman Reviews Danez Smith's Homie for LARB

Amanda Gorman reviews Danez Smith's newest collection, Homie (Graywolf), which is "anchored in the homie heaven here on earth, in neighborhoods, churches, and kitchens," for Los Angeles Review of Books. From her review:

Perhaps this is one of Smith’s grandest talents: diving into the pool of a poem at one angle (for example, “my president,” in the singular sense) only to emerge in a new framework (the multitudes of presidents) that makes us see poetry and its meanings anew. For example, consider “fall poem.” Its title subconsciously implies a traditional nature poem, idyllic and dreamy, where we are lulled by imagery of the changing seasons. Yet the piece is anything but:

the leaves have done their annual shimmy.
now the streetlight with no soft green curtain
cuts a silver blade across my bed

& my body. i didn’t want to start with leaves
even though I love how the trees turn the color of aunts
& should-train-line to ground each October. no one

wants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen
body, something easy to mourn, body cut out of the light
body lit up with bullets. see how easy it is to bring up bullets?
is it possible to ban guns? even from this poem?
i lie in the light, body split by light, room too bright for sleep
thinking of the leaf-colored bodies, their weekly fall

In a tonal shift tectonic enough to render us with literary whiplash, falling leaves are juxtaposed starkly against fallen bodies. One can almost hear the soft, resonant echo of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Furthermore, in the sharp pronouncement that “no one / wants to hear a poem about fall; much prefer the fallen / body,” Smith draws attention to the fetishization of suffering and violence... 

Read on at LARB.