I’ve followed Danez Smith informally via the podcast they run with Franny Choi (whose poetry collection Soft Science I review here): Vs: The Podcast. But this is my first chance to read an entire collection by Smith, and it was incredibly powerful. Homie is the publisher’s title so that white people don’t use the title of Smith’s heart.
This collection is clever and playful, heartbreaking and raw, analytical and visceral. The core of it is about the loss, to suicide, of a lifelong friend, and it orbits out from there, considering other kinds of grief, Blackness, queerness, HIV, societal violence, and complicated joy. It seems impossible to truly review these powerful poems, but here are some particularly meaningful lines:
in me–a monument to your fray
in you–a trap door back to myself.
before holy there was your grace
page 47
after the body
spits out the soul like a seed
we are left to harvest this black fruit–
your name perched in the past tense.
page 45
let me live on the tongues
of my people & when they gone
from this world then i have no use
for me, let language end when they end
page 68
Allongé 