# Bluff

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/danez-smith/bluff/9781529945959

![Bluff](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage-digital/danez-smith/bluff_978-15-2994-595-9-9c1ecad1.webp?v=2026-09-30%2002%3A35%3A19)

- Book: [Bluff](https://www.bookquiver.com/danez-smith/bluff) ([Bluff.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/danez-smith/bluff.md))
- Authors: [Danez Smith](https://www.bookquiver.com/danez-smith)
- Publisher: vintage_digital
- Medium: audio
- Length: 2 h 30 min
- Narrated by: Danez Smith
- ISBN: 978-15-2994-595-9
- Published: 2024-08-22
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Audiobook · 2 h 30 min

## Description

Brought to you by Penguin. A searing new collection from the Forward Prize-winning American poet about the year that the world’s gaze turned to Minneapolis – Smith's own home. Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to ‘anti poetica’ and ‘ars america’ to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A brilliant long poem maps the history of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighbourhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it. Bluff is a manifesto about artistic resilience when the places we most love – those given and made – are burning. In this collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage and imagination to envision futures that seem possible. ‘A writer who never loses their way’ New York Times © Danez Smith 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2024