Alive at the End of the World
Praise for How We Fight for Our Lives
Winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/ Biography
Winner of the 2020 Stonewall Book Award–Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award
Winner of the 2020 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
One of the best books of the year as selected by the New York Times; the Washington Post; NPR; Time; the New Yorker; NBC’s Today Show; O, The Oprah Magazine; Entertainment Weekly; Harper’s Bazaar; ELLE; Marie Claire; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more.
“[A] devastating memoir.… Jones is fascinated by power (who has it, how and why we deploy it), but he seems equally interested in tenderness and frailty. We wound and save one another, we try our best, we leave too much unsaid.… A moving, bracingly honest memoir that reads like fevered poetry.”
—Benoit Denizet-Lewis, The New York Times
“A raw and eloquent memoir.… At once explicitly raunchy, mean, nuanced, loving and melancholy. It’s sometimes hard to read and harder to put down.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Urgent, immediate, matter of fact.… The prose in Saeed Jones’s memoir How We Fight for Our Lives shines with a poet’s desire to give intellections the force of sense impressions.”
—Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
“A luminous, clear-eyed excavation of how we learn to define ourselves.… A radiant memoir that meditates on the many ways we belong to each other and the many ways we are released.”
—Ada Limón, San Francisco Chronicle
“An outstanding memoir that somehow manages a perfect balance between love and violence, hope and hostility, transformation and resentment.… More importantly, it’s a narrative that cements Jones as a new literary star—and a book that will give many an injection of hope.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR
“Jones’ explosive and poetic memoir traces his coming-of-age as a black, queer, and Southern man in vignettes that heartbreakingly and rigorously explore the beauty of love, the weight of trauma, and the power of resilience.” —Entertainment Weekly
“There are moments of devastating ugliness and moments of ecstatic joy … infused with an emotional energy that only authenticity can provide.” —Michael Kleber-Diggs, Star Tribune
“[This] memoir marks the emergence of a major literary voice.… Written with masterful control of both style and material.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Powerful.… Jones is a remarkable, unflinching storyteller, and his book is a rewarding page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“How We Fight for Our Lives is a primer in how to keep kicking, in how to stay afloat.…Thank god we get to be part of that world with Saeed Jones’ writing in it.” —D. Gilson, Lambda Literary
“Jones’ evocative prose has a layered effect, immersing readers in his state of mind, where gorgeous turns of phrase create some distance from his more painful memories.… There is enough turmoil and poetry and determination in it to fill whole bookshelves.”
—The A.V. Club
Praise for Prelude to Bruise
Winner of the 2015 Stonewall Book Award–Barbara Gittings Literature Award
Winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Finalist for the 2015 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
One of the best books of the year as selected by NPR, Time Out New York, Split This Rock, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and many more.
“Saeed’s Prelude to Bruise is a rigorous collection that challenges political, sexual and familial norms and bristles with pain.… No matter the subject, Jones’s writing is silky smooth.”
—Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
“This is indeed a book seamed in smoke; it is a dance that invites you to admire the supple twist of its narrative spine; it is hard and glaring and brilliant as the anthracite that opens the collection: ‘a voice mistook for stone, / jagged black fist.’” —Amal El-Mohtar, NPR
“The features that distinguish his poems from prose—brevity, symbolism, implication—let him investigate the almost unsayable.”
—Stephanie Burt, Los Angeles Times
“The way these poems address violence, life in the south, race, sexuality and relationships makes for an engrossing read best consumed in as few sittings as possible.” —Nolan Feeney, Time
“In his debut collection, Jones has crafted a fever dream, something akin to magic.… Solid from start to finish, possessing amazing energy and focus, a bold new voice in poetry has announced itself.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A powerful collection … with a high level of craft, emotion and metaphor.” —Brook Stephenson, Ebony
“This powerful collection feels at times like a blow to the throat, but when we recover, the air is sweeter for having been absent.”
—Erica Wright, Guernica
“A work of insight and great beauty, Jones’ first poetry collection manages to be both ferocious and subtle.”
—Margaret Eby, Brooklyn Magazine
“These poems are tightly constructed, scary-beautiful, and lyrically brilliant, driven by a raw and devastating emotional power.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, The Millions
“The poems in Prelude to Bruise enflame, with all flame’s consequences of wounding and illumination.… It’s a story of the forces of destruction—the destruction of black bodies and black selves—built into America, and it surfaces in lines of lust, violence, possession, and power.” —Kate Schapira, Rain Taxi
ALIVE AT THE END
OF THE WORLD
poems
SAEED JONES
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
Minneapolis
2022
Copyright © 2022 by Saeed Jones
Foreword copyright © 2022 by D. A. Powell
Cover artwork © Lola Flash
Cover design by Michael Salu
Book design by Bookmobile
Author photograph © Saeed Jones
Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, cbsd.com or (800) 283-3572. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to info@coffeehousepress.org.
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Jones, Saeed, author.
Title: Alive at the end of the world : poems / Saeed Jones.
Description: Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022008411 (print) | LCCN 2022008412 (ebook) | ISBN 9781566896511 (paperback) | ISBN 9781566896528 (epub)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O6279 A79 2022 (print) | LCC PS3610.O6279 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20220428
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008411
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008412
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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Table of Contents
Foreword by D. A. Powell
Alive at the End of the World
Alive at the End of the World
A Memory
That’s Not Snow, It’s Ash
I
f You Had an Off Button, I’d Name You “Off”
A Song for the Status Quo
All I Gotta Do Is Stay Black and Die
It’s 1975 and Paul Mooney Says “Nigger” a Hundred Times
Deleted Voice Message: Hey, Robyn—It’s Me, Whitney
Grief #213
Saeed, or The Other One: I
Alive at the End of the World
Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude
Saeed Wonders If the Poem You Just Read Would’ve Been Better Served by a Different Title
Heritage
After the School Board Meeting
Black Ice
The Trial
Gravity
Aretha Franklin Hears an Echo While Singing “Save Me”
Diahann Carroll Takes a Bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel
Grief #913
Saeed, or the Other One: II
Alive at the End of the World
“Sorry as in Pathetic”
A Stranger
Okay, One More Story
Okay, One More Story
Date Night
The Essential American Worker
Against Progeny
A Difficult Love Song for Luther Vandross
Little Richard Listens to Pat Boone Sing “Tutti Frutti”
Grief #346
Saeed, or The Other One: III
Alive at the End of the World
Extinction
Everything Is Dying, Nothing Is Dead
A Spell to Banish Grief
The Dead Dozens
After Watching a Video of Cicely Tyson Singing a Hymn, I Realize I Wasn’t a Good Grandson
Performing as Miss Calypso, Maya Angelou Dances Whenever She Forgets the Lyrics, which Billie Holiday, Seated in the Audience, Finds Annoying
At 84 Years Old, Toni Morrison Wonders If She’s Depressed
All I Gotta Do Is Stay Black and Die (Apocalyptic Remix)
Grief #1
Saeed, or The Other One: IV
Notes at the End of the World
Foreword
D. A. Powell
“I will instruct my sorrows to be proud,” wrote Shakespeare, “for grief is proud and makes his owner stout.” Well, in some editions, the word is stout. In others, the text reads “makes his owner stoop.” Stout or stoop? Two very different ways of thinking about the weight of suffering: does it thicken us, make us stronger? Stout. Or does it bend us like a tree branch grown heavy with icicles? Stoop. It’s so hard to know which is right. They both seem true. When Diahann Carroll’s character Dominique Deveraux on the eighies nighttime soap Dynasty is left by her husband Brady, played by heartthrob Billy Dee Williams, she bears up and sings. But she also collapses. Grief makes her stout. Grief makes her stoop.
Saeed Jones’s bountiful second collection grieves but never stoops. In fact, these poems stand up to death and sorrow, tossing barbs in the midst of loss, turning the blues shades of purple and violet that register alternately as bruise and blush. When we encounter the End of the World, it is a tale of transformation: a dress with a bejeweled bodice, a drag nightclub, a ghost “mean as spit.” All that. And so much more. An elegy told in a rapid round of the dozens: “Your grief is so heavy, when we lowered the coffin, all the pallbearers fell in too.” Whoop. The humor comes in so sharp and edgy it’s a wonder it doesn’t cut out one’s heart to read it. “I grieve the men I mistook for one another and the mistakes I took for men.” Yes, tea will be spilt. But the head stays up. If there’s a mess on the floor, it’s for somebody else to clean up. Indeed, when ghosts show up “I tell them to clean up after themselves.”
In a sweeping formal range—from prose paragraphs to strict verse forms—Jones conveys to us not only the private losses (in a living room “sick with the scent of farewell flowers”) but the public ones as well: the legacy of state-supported violence against Black bodies “broken open” by the lash of history and the continued use of deadly force by police. “I grieve my face onto the covers of history books.” “History,” Jones writes, “pretends to forget itself.” The excoriating wit that punctuates these poems is not “comic relief” but comic awareness, an escalation of intensity in order that no truth can be deemed inconvenient, nor can it be glossed over. Like Dick Gregory’s joke that “they gave me the key to the city … and then they changed the locks,” the humor does not mitigate the truth; it magnifies it.
Grief is not just a wellspring of sorrow that bubbles up inside us; it is also something inflicted. Consider the boy in these poems “who feels all the pain we give him but never bruises” and how his experience mirrors the stories of Black artists and entertainers who have borne the indignity of having their work stolen, erased, or commodified. Many of those artists appear in these poems, bearing the grief doled out by the machinery of white corporate capitalism: Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross, Diahann Carroll. In one poem, Little Richard—arguably one of rock and roll’s greatest innovators—listens to the vanilla strains of Pat Boone’s cover of his song “Tutti Frutti” (originally a sexual romp filled with “good booty”) and considers the violence being perpetrated against his art. “The history of music in America is a sample of the sound of a woman sobbing,” writes Jones. “And the woman who wrote the original version never got a dime for her work and died poor.”
Despite all the grief in these poems, one does not sag under the heavy load of it. There is so much else at work: love, sensual pleasure, and survival are the strong threads woven throughout the fabric of this book to keep it from fraying. “Yes, I hear the sirens and I am their scream but tonight,” one of the four title poems asserts, “I will moan a future into my man’s mouth.”
I am reminded of a generation of Black queer men whose poems testified in the open court of love, who braved the homophobic and racist climate of the eighties only to be taken too soon by AIDS and the culture of apathy and outright hate that swirled around the center of the cyclone it cut through the literary community. Assotto Saint, Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill. Their work was not in vain. They are the ancestors whose poems made the work of Saeed Jones possible. “When my brother fell,” wrote Hemphill, “I picked up his weapons and never once questioned whether I could carry the weight and grief, the responsibility he shouldered.” It is not just his own grief Jones is shouldering, it is a legacy of systemic erasure he is both honoring and dismantling. At the same time, Saeed Jones is building a bridge for a future generation to cross. This is a heavy book because it carries so much hope and possibility.
Alive at the End of the World
The end of the world was mistaken
for just another midday massacre
in America. Brain matter and broken
glass, blurred boot prints in pools
of blood. We dialed the newly dead
but they wouldn’t answer. We texted,
begging them to call us back, but
the newly dead don’t know how to
read. In America, a gathering of people
is called target practice or a funeral,
depending on who lives long enough
to define the terms. But for now, we
are alive at the end of the world,
shell-shocked by headlines and alarm
clocks, burning through what little love
we have left. With time, the white boys
with guns will become wounds we won’t
quite remember enduring. “How did you
get that scar on your shoulder?” “Oh,
a boy I barely knew was sad once.”
“Everyone is running now, and everywhere batons rise. The screams lift out of the street and in restaurants up and down the block doors are locked and the diners are informed, You cannot leave, not right now, sorry for the disturbance.”
—Alexander Chee, “1989”
“This ‘objective vertigo’ is described by Frank Wilderson as a ‘life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation.’ This st
ate is inherent to Blackness and, I would add, queer subjectivities. Because, as Wilderson explains, ‘one’s environment is perpetually unhinged.’”
—Katelyn Hale Wood, Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States
“Who’s going to believe you, nigger?”
—Richard Pryor, This Can’t Be Happening to Me
“As a boy I seldom lived in the present. It hurt too much to be in the present. When I occurred to myself I was myself in the future.”
—Afropessimism, Frank B. Wilderson III
“Who’s going to believe you, nigger?”
—Richard Pryor, This Can’t Be Happening to Me
“In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.”
—Adrienne Rich, “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”
“You cannot leave, not right now, sorry for the disturbance.”
—Saeed Jones repeating a line from “1989” by Alexander Chee, whatever happens next, please understand that Saeed Jones is somewhere right now, maybe in his kitchen or living room, saying “You cannot leave, not right now, sorry for the disturbance” to himself
Alive at the End of the World
The world ends and I make a dress