Bluff by Danez Smith

Bluff by Danez Smith is a fourth collection of poems rooted in Minneapolis that confronts state violence, grief, queerness, Black life, and the limits and uses of poetry itself; formally adventurous—moving from ars poetica to collage—it interrogates class, protest, and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder while insisting on artistic resilience and flickers of hope; widely acclaimed, it was named a 2024 poetry standout and praised for its piercing honesty and political charge.

Danez Smith's Bluff: Poems on Social Injustice and the Chaotic Nature of the Human Experience

Bluff by Danez Smith. Published on August 20, 2024, by Graywolf Press.

Bluff, published August 20, 2024 by Graywolf Press, opens with a gauntlet. “anti poetica” appears, then returns, then returns again, each time stripping away faith in verse-as-cure. The poem’s refusals stack up — “no poem wiser than kindness,” “no poem free from money’s ruin,” “no poem to admonish the state” — before the hinge:

no poem to admonish the stateno poem with a key to the locksno poem to free you

Smith doesn’t offer balm. The poem revokes poetry’s license to rescue. The gesture is aesthetic and ethical: a clear-eyed accounting of what language can carry and what it drops.

The following piece, “ars america (in the hold),” hardens the stance. With an Amiri Baraka epigraph — “Warriors are poets and poems” — Smith names the page as a site of struggle and calls for the end of false orders: “kill the stars … kill all reason … kill god.” The sequence reframes the collection’s terms. If the lyric will not save you, what can it make? Heat. Friction. Refusal.

That question ripples outward. Bluff moves from public indictment to private cost, and it does so without theatrics. In “less hope,” Smith turns the blade on the economy around their own work:

apologies. i was part of the joyindustrial complex: told them their bodies weremiracles & they ate it up, sold someday,made money off soon & now, snuck an ode into the elegy…they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty&, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them.i took the awards & cashed the checks.i did the one about the boy when requested …in lieu of action, i wrote a book

Self-indictment becomes form. The poem names clout, currency, the transactional appetite that trails Black grief across stages and prize lists. Smith refuses to leave themself outside that frame.

Elsewhere the pivot is explicit. “volta” asks, “i need a new bravery. i don’t want to live / a coward’s peace. where’s my mission? / what world comes if i use my hands?” The collection keeps pressing that line. In “on knowledge,” a black square stitched with white “I”s stages the trap of being named and sold. Smith, who writes “i” in lowercase, writes, “i helped patent / my chain,” then ends on a single unboxed word: “action.” The exit is conceptual, not triumphant. The book will not hand you a program; it will remove your excuses.

Hope and despair both get tested. Late in the collection, the speaker offers a map: “Let me map you to oasis … Let me show you where / the weapons are.” The weapon is not the lyric-as-key. The weapon is attention, then decision. Even that promise is complicated by the book’s title. Bluff can mean confidence. It can mean threat. It can mean a high edge where the ground drops away.

Tone marks the distance from Homie. Where the earlier book spun joy and kinship into a chorus, Bluff sounds harsher, more judicial. The radiance hasn’t vanished; it is rationed. “my people ain’t even my people. their utopia / calls for my death & they dress for the occasion.” The line rejects easy solidarity while refusing cynicism’s cheap relief.

Place anchors the argument. Minneapolis is rendered without euphemism: “my murderer, my mother / ship, my moose heart, my mercy.” The city holds George Floyd’s murder and a food drive that makes the speaker weep. Protest and police. Looting and mutual aid. The poems refuse a single moral angle; they insist on the whole scene, which is to say the truth.

Structure mirrors that ethic. The book cycles “anti poetica” and “ars america,” then slips in “ars poetica,” a move that confesses the performance of confession. Smith has long distrusted the pedestal. In an earlier poem they asked, “messenger” or “tomb raider.” Bluff refuses either crown. The poems will not march you to a finish line. They will force you to sit with what remains.

Closure doesn’t arrive. The final pages hold the door ajar. Smith offers no grand synthesis, only the charge to witness and the pressure to choose. The collection asks for a reader willing to keep two truths in hand at once: harm persists, beauty persists. There is no poem to free you. There is still work to do.