Don't Call Us Dead: Poems

A searing, vital poetry collection that illuminates the lived realities of Black queer bodies in America. Smith opens with “summer, somewhere,” envisioning an otherworld where Black boys lost to police violence can be free, naming themselves and playing in peace—an alternate heaven born from grief, memory, and resistance. Throughout the collection, poems confront police brutality, HIV, and systemic racism with raw lyricism—“some of us are killed in pieces, some of us all at once”—while also grounding the reader in tenderness, intimacy, and the quiet persistence of survival. Each page pulses with fierce honesty and transformative love, reclaiming space for the marginalized and affirming what it truly means to be alive.

~ Included for its brave and urgent reckoning with race, queerness, mortality, and resilience. Smith’s voice resounds with beauty, defiance, and elegiac grace—this is poetry that refuses erasure and insists on speaking Black queer truth into being. ~