I think my favorite poems tend to be about seeing\/looking rather than feeling\/being, whether the seeing is real or imagined. A lot of the poems in this collection are more on the feeling\/being side of things; many of them are about moving through the world in a body that is Black, queer, and HIV-positive, and there is a lot of focus on the interior, both in the sense of what’s inside the body (blood, a virus) and in the sense of the narrator’s feelings about the knowledge of their illness, this invisible thing that they have to carry, that they have to disclose, that they have to live with. <\/p>\n
Highlights for me were more outward-looking poems like “summer, somewhere,” which is excerpted on the Poetry Foundation website<\/a> (and which is about Black boys and men killed by police, and which is really powerful and beautiful and sad) and “Dinosaurs in the Hood”<\/a> (whose closing lines I love so much). (Here’s a video of Smith performing “Dinosaurs in the Hood”<\/a>.) I also really like “at the down-low house party”<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think my favorite poems tend to be about seeing\/looking rather than feeling\/being, whether the seeing is real or imagined. A lot of the poems in this collection are more on the feeling\/being side of things; many of them are about moving through the world in a body that is Black, queer, and HIV-positive, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}