Bluff by Danez Smith (Chatto & Windus, £14.99)
In this excoriating collection, we see Smith painfully question their role as an artist in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd, in their hometown Minneapolis-St Paul; along with the failures of liberal progressivism in terms of race, class, queerness and gender. Of their support of Obama they write, “Admit it Danez, you loved / Your master … loved / Knowing the colour at the end of my chain / Matched mine … Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.” Smith’s interrogation of poetry’s complicity in suffering is expressed in brilliantly crafted, rhythmically complex verse – “I was part of the joy / industrial complex … forced the dead to smile & juke.” Smith powerfully attacks America’s oppressions, while also violently rejecting the white establishment’s hollow feting of their work – “we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty … I bowed & worse, smiled. / teach me to never bend again.”
Fantasia by Nisha Ramayya (Granta, £12.99)
An explosive and wildly intelligent collection from one of the UK’s most exhilarating poets, considering how sound and listening might be entangled with politics, liberation and transformation: “What’s listening to/ the sound of the spheres of the unborn, while the born are crying/ here?” These sonically fierce, experimental poems wrestle with the difficulty of making one’s true self known through sound: “the thought of / speaking, of hearing herself speak, of compelling body to expend / more breath … of interiority exiting the body without smell, stain …” At the same time as speech can fail, music can escape “the stranglehold of stories told and retold”. The freeing music of jazz legend Alice Coltrane resonates throughout, sound that goes beyond the heavy weight of rotten and oppressive histories – “our ears, like seashells, still / multitudinously murmuring of the ocean as we flee / through spiracle, as we fountain, glitter, celestify”.
