Reviews with content warning for Police brutality - Homie

Buy it! Read it! If you’re white, use it to develop some empathy! I’m white and my heart grew ten times the size. Off to go buy their other poetry collectives.

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becksusername's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

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therainbowshelf's review

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challenging emotional hopeful informative reflective tense fast-paced

5.0

Danez Smith’s poetry is reflective of life, and takes a hard look at racism, homophobia, and living with aids. There are a lot of striking lines in this book. I listened to the audio, so although I don’t think I got as much of the poems’ contents, it was fun listening to Danez perform his work. I also appreciated the intro explaining the real title of this collection and why he called it Homie.

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yellow_star's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

3.75

Overall this book is basically Angry Poems, and an aggressive theme. But most of it is fair. Like the line "poeming some men's hands off, they know what they did" (paraphrase not exact words) is aggressive but fair. There is a poem in the beginning about a whole group beating one kid up though so maybe don't have young kids read this.

There's also themes of racism, bigotry, etc. There are also the related slurs.

The nature poems are so fresh! I love the completely new to me imagery for nature.

The poverty poems are also completely relatable.

I'm not a huge fan of poems that jump all over the place like a lot of modern literary poetry does, but each poem is usually about some topic and mostly continues the same conversation. There's still a little bit of chaotic unrelated subject changes but very little.

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rlgreen91's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

What a gorgeous, gorgeous collection of poems. A dear friend gave this to me for Christmas, and since I had a bit of time between book club selections, I decided to pick it up, with goal of reading a poem a day. I went into it with no expectations, which was a great idea. I was pleasantly surprised and thrilled by the many ways Smith conveyed and depicted friendship and community and grief in the poems. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be "acknowledgements," and "self-portrait as '90s R&B video" was the most fun to read out loud.

Revisiting "fall poem" on this Sunday October evening is the best way to cap off this collection. I'm already looked forward to the next thing I read by Smith. 5 stars.

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