Homie

About the Book

'A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness,' Guardian

'In its cutting compassion, Homie is as much a celebration of loved ones' lives as it is a lament for their loss, equally a war cry for kinship and the burial dirge after the battle' Amanda Gorman

A mighty anthem about the saving grace of friendship, Danez Smith's highly anticipated collection Homie is rooted in their search for joy and intimacy in a time where both are scarce. In poems of rare power and generosity, Smith acknowledges that in a country overrun by violence, xenophobia and disparity, and in a body defined by race, queerness, and diagnosis, it can be hard to survive, even harder to remember reasons for living. But then the phone lights up, or a shout comes up to the window, and family - blood and chosen - arrives with just the right food and some redemption.

Part friendship diary, part bright elegy, part war cry, Homie is written for friends: for Danez's friends, for yours.

'This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way' New York Times

About the Author :
Danez Smith is the author of Homie (2020) and Don’t Call Us Dead (2018), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Four Quartets Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Award. They live in Minneapolis.

Review :
I’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity... The radiance of Homie arrives like a shock, like found money, like a flower fighting through concrete... This is a book full of the turbulence of thought and desire, piloted by a writer who never loses their way. That compass — provided by friends, influences, collaborators — stays steady. A deeply personal collection... and provocative and moving meditation on friendship, sex and blackness. Danez Smith has always been the most talented voice of our generation, but it’s here, in their third collection, that their virtuosic abilities are matched by the ambitiousness of their heart. Here, they’ve built a table big enough to hold all of it: the small shames that accompany grief, the ecstasy of chosen kinship, "your people, my people, all that hashappened / to us" This book reads as gospel, as righteous text that carves a religion out of friendship... Blessed be Danez Smith, for allowing us that closeness... Smith holds genius in them, and we are lucky that they choose to share it with usso abundantly Homie is how we survive – in verse... For Danez, friendship is a forest ripe with foliage and possibility... They offer us poems of seed and breath, charging us to reimagine the world as inhabitable and safe in this skin and these bodies beckoning us back to dirt Homie is deeply moving and funny… [and] a step change from Smith’s earlier work The president of black voices in poetry. Smith uses their new collection to explore the ideas of friendship, intimacy and comfort I return to this collection to remind myself of what is possible on the page, the joy, the rigour, the necessity of a strut. Smith writes towards the abundant and the difficult and makes something that is rare - a piece of art that refuses self-consciousness and is exactly what it wants to be A great collection of poetry about friendship, sex and Blackness. It's rare for me to go back to poetry but I come back to this again and again... It's beautiful A collection to read as we reflect on the challenges 2020 has presented to us all