May 31, 2026
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is the author of four collections including Bluff, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Their prose has been featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Their fifth collection – Love, Time – will be published Fall 2027. They live in Minneapolis with their people.
if Time happens
God is detail
if Time is random
God is a hunger for pattern
if Time kills God does too
I’ve come to understand that what separates poetry from other literature is a foundational relationship to music, to sound, and to rhythm. Poetry’s sonic ancestor being far older than its written one, I understand then that all poetry is performance, all poems are waiting to be performed, and that there is no public poem that isn’t affected by the fact that it will have to be communicated to someone else.