Black Movie

Danez Smith, 2015.

Danez Smith's Black Movie, the winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Prize.

Awards

2014 Button Poetry Prize - Winner

Praise

These harrowing poems make montage, make mirrors, make elegiac biopic, make "dope ass trailer with a hundred black children / smiling into the camera & the last shot is the wide mouth of a pistol." That's no spoiler alert, but rather, Smith's way--saying & laying it beautifully bare. A way of desensitizing the reader from his own defenses each time this long, Black Movie repeats.

- Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

Danez Smith's BLACK MOVIE is a cinematic tour-de-force that lets poetry vie with film for the honor of which medium can most effectively articulate the experience of Black America.

– Rain Taxi