YOUR HOMIE FROM ANOTHER

REFLECTIONS ON LARB

RICHIE HOFMANN

As a poet and a critic, I am immensely grateful to the editors of the Los Angeles Review of Books for supporting my writing and for giving me the opportunity to write on new books of poetry that matter to me.

I was especially delighted to share my passion for the poetry of James Merrill with readers occasioned by the publication of Stephen Yenser’s well-executed edition of The Book of Ephraim (Knopf, 2018). And to praise Jericho Brown’s deft handling of love and violence in his unforgettable collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon, 2019), which went on to win the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

The poem reprinted here, “The Mind of Art,” is from a sequence of dramatic monologues called “The Prince,” in the voice of an imagined 18th-century exiled courtesan, based loosely on the Comtesse de Soissons, in which she meditates on art, sex, letter writing, motherhood, murder, fashion, and abandonment.

Mostly, I interact with LARB as a reader, hungry for sophisticated, complex, enjoyable book reviewing in a landscape where fewer and fewer publications make space for serious and rigorous critique. I look forward to the next 10 years of insightful criticism and memorable creative writing. I am truly honored to be a part of this magazine’s history.

ART TK

Amita Bhatt, Heroism is believing in the possibility of the impossible, 2015, oil on canvas, 48 by 48 inches.

YOUR HOMIE FROM ANOTHER HEART: ON DANEZ SMITH’S ‘HOMIE’

AMANDA GORMAN

Danez Smith's latest poetry collection, Homie, is actually not titled Homie at all. As the National Book Award finalist confirms point-blank in a note on the title: “this book was titled homie because I don’t want non-black people to say my nig out loud. This book is really titled my nig.” Indeed, a second title page announces: “my nig / poems / Danez Smith.” Which raises the question: how are we meant to read this charged word that Smith stylistically summons in a work deeply concerned with solidarity and survival, friendship, family, and the frailty of the body and its blood? For starters, the title unapologetically alerts us to the collection’s wider magnanimous project: who these poems

are for. If Smith’s previous book Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize, is a rumination on the ruination of black bodies, then Homie heralds the redemptive power of black friendship. Whereas lamenting poems in Don’t Call Us Dead, such as “summer, somewhere” and the viral “dear white america” detail a black afterlife beyond this troubled planet, Homie is anchored in the homie heaven here on earth, in neighborhoods, churches, and kitchens.

Smith — they/them/theirs — celebrates unsung heroes who create safe spaces for the marginalized. For them, these everyday fortresses are found on the frontier of family, fraternity, and friendship. In a three-paged anthemic opening poem, “my president,” Smith heralds the community-building of common people:

& every head nod is my president & every child singing summer with a red sweet tongue is my president & the birds

the cooks & the single moms especially

Here Smith repositions the political power of a president within simple social acts of solidarity, such as nodding kindly in the black quotidian fashion. In a crescendo highly reminiscent of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” the wordsmith continues:

& the boy crying on the train & the sudden abuela who rubs his back & the uncle who offers him water & the drag queen who begins to hum

o my presidents! my presidents! my presidents! my presidents!

show me to our nation my only border is my body

i sing your names sing your names your names

my mighty anthem

Smith pluralizes the title “my president” at the poem’s climax, expanding and elevating a diverse cohort of souls to the highest office in the land. Here, the defenders of the free world are not in the Oval Office, but drivers of buses and children smiling brightly with their innocence. And Smith’s presidents aren’t just a multitude; they are also multilingual. Smith praises their grandma, whose “cabinet is her cabinet / cause she knows how to trust what the pan knows / how the skillet wins the war,” tapping into her own cultural wells of knowledge. Yet Smith also describes the “sudden abuela” coming to the aid of a child. English rolls seamlessly into Spanish, because they are part of the same transcendent tale.

To truly understand this poem’s genius, it must be read within the sociopolitical context of digital declarations of #notmypresident, wherein liberals have rejected Donald Trump’s shady ascent to Pennsylvania Avenue. Which inevitably leads us to wonder: If Smith explicitly lists who their presidents are, who is their president not? Trump, we might assume. Yet Smith also does not list former