Like most people, I don’t read nearly enough poetry. Despite marvelous luck with my last two poetry reads: Billy Collins collection: SAILING ALONE AROUND THE ROOM (alternately funny and touching) & Edward Hirsch: GABRIEL (utterly devastating—the very soul screams with pain), still I hesitate. I think I’m slow to read new poetry because it is such a high wire act. Prose has the luxury of enough words to fill landscapes while poetry is just that small puddle after a brief rain. Poetry has so little margin for error that I lose hope quickly if it doesn’t grab me right away. Thankfully Danez Smith’s DON’T CALL US DEAD starts in a way that moves and informs and opens communication for the poems that follow. The poems are a skin you’ll use to feel how young gay men of color live and die and move back and forth between the two. Many of these poems shout across this divide with anger and despair like nails across that skin. The beauty of this book is the tangible sense of the life somehow going on after the young man has been lost to drugs or violence or at the hands of the law. There is a kind of gossamer existence that continues shining back what might have been had the lives not ended early. There are a few parts that didn’t work for me but the rest was so good I just considered them a moment to rest.