Danez Smith’s fourth book of poetry, Bluff, is a robust and inventive read, with poems ranging from essayistic to wordless. (One piece, “METRO” is a QR code that takes readers online to over two dozen pages that didn’t make it into the printed collection.) Bluff begins with a personal query: Has the poet betrayed their community by making art about Black pain? This is a topic the speaker returns to again and again in early pieces, where they critique both white audiences’ appetites for anti-Black violence and the rewards that come to those who can satisfy those cravings. At the same time, there are poems about the persistent beauty of Black communities, even in the face of generational violence and the unfulfilled promise of progress: Neither exoduses from the Jim Crow South nor the first Black president have improved the lives of most Black Americans.
In “Minneapolis, St. Paul,” and “My Beautiful End of the World,” two mini-essays that cordon off the center of the book, Smith delves into the problems plaguing America’s heartland, ones that are in fact happening all over the country. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” describes the protests following George Floyd’s murder in diaristic fashion, while “My Beautiful End of the World” chronicles how gentrification is killing the land and restricting access to what remains of its natural beauty. Later poems make clear that the dream of peace and the possibility of a utopia can exist, if in no other place, then in the poetry, right alongside an unabashed reckoning with poverty and racism. Bluff asks, “What shall we do with this land we were never meant to own?” and “How shall we live on it together in the little time we have left?” The answer may lie in the final lines of the book, where the speaker awakens next to a lover and is reminded of the power of the love they make together.
Bluff is a book that indicts and inquires: It interrogates the poet’s past work and revises it, while resisting the powers that threaten to sell us out and sell us short. In the end, it offers joy and hope, but not without the sober warning that we are running out of bluffs, out of delusions, out of land and perhaps out of time to right our wrongs.
