Poetry

All that remain to us of Sappho's poems are fragments, some only a handful of words. Burn Lyrics incorporates these extant fragments into fully-fleshed poems in entirely contemporary voices, underscoring the flexibility of language and the ways we make compelling meanings out of our limited experiences of the world.

Burn Lyrics is an entirely original accomplishment. Benjamin Landry has reached into the past and its erasures, and brought into our time and place something new and strange. This collection transforms poetry into lived experience-full of atmosphere and physicality and mysterious specificity and music. Landry is a poet of uncommon gifts, one who has uncovered or discovered an entirely unexpected path for this art form. Burn Lyrics began as a remarkable urge, and it is now a spellbinding and transformative reading experience for the rest of us.
Laura Kasischke, author of Space, in Chains and The Infinitesimals

Benjamin Landry crafts an eco-lyric voice that celebrates everyday life yet remains "realistic about the future of the coastline." Throughout Burn Lyrics, the speaker walks barefoot amongst family and strangers, wolves and goats, hummingbirds and pigeons, greenswards and dandelions, storms and fires. At the end of this journey, the old lyric self sheds its skin and the book becomes a new self to call and return the body home.
Craig Santos Perez, author of from unincorporated territory

You might think that a poem housing a fragment of sacred text-Sappho's incandescent shards-would be a thing relatively inert in itself: at best a reliquary, at worst a golem. But Benjamin Landry splendidly shatters such preconceptions in this brilliant collection. The landscapes are so captivating, the perspectives so enticing, the emotional currents so swift and strong that you notice, only in passing, that a text you thought long dead has quickened, miraculously, into breathing, exuberant life.
Monica Youn, author of Ignatz and Blackacre

Benjamin Landry's Burn Lyrics both fleshes out the mystery of and satisfies the desires awakened by Sappho's fragments. We are sated at every turn. He is a master not only of the line but also of the heart. Landry offers a new lens through which to view the world; "it's the sort of thing that colors your personal heaven," and, as a reader, I'm left to wonder if this is possible, can the poem curate so much emotion in a world filled with so many distractions, but then I turn another page and realize, "Sometimes, it happens this way."
A. Van Jordan, author of The Cineaste and M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection

"[Smith's] poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy."--The New Yorker

Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality--the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood--and a diagnosis of HIV positive. "Some of us are killed / in pieces," Smith writes, "some of us all at once." Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America--"Dear White America"--where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.