Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection from the award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight For Our Lives Confronts Our Everyday Apocalypses.

Product Code: 9149
ISBN: 9781566896511
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Pages: 104
Published Date: 09/13/2022
Availability:In stock
N/A
Price: $16.99

In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.

Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what’s within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America’s existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here—and the apocalypse is a state of being.


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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
If 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
Acknowledgments
About the Author

“The potent latest from Jones excoriates an American present that refuses to learn from its past or correct for a possibly disastrous future. A kaleidoscope of grief and anger mixes with the poet’s wit, giving these timely poems a striking directness. . . . This penetrating collection shows Jones at his poetic best.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Jones’s latest is yet another masterly work, though sung in a distinctly different tenor. . . . [His] most free-flowing work yet, a centripetal collection where rage and pain and weariness swirl and coalesce with stunning emotional and conceptual clarity, yet so intimate it feels bled from the author’s very veins.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Jones unravels and reconfigures language like he’s untying a knot, then rethreads the strands in a delicate new construction. . . . Jones writes in the space between wreckage and resilience. He offers a calibrated reckoning with his own grief, cradled in ambiguity—and we wait, holding our breath, to see what is tendered next.” —Erin Overbey, The New Yorker

“Personal and universal, full of grief and sadness but also packed with hope and humor, stylish and entertaining but also profound and touching. The work of Saeed Jones has always been those things, but perhaps never as much as it is in this poetry collection. We knew great work would come from the pandemic, and mixed with his own life, experiences and losses, Jones has delivered what we all knew was coming: beautiful, shining work about the darkness that often envelops us.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“As he did in his memoir and his previous poetry collection, Jones here whips up a dizzying blend of humor, vulnerability and astute social observation to map his place in the world.” —The New York Times

“A serious argument for community and the rebellion of joy. I love [“Alive at the End of the World”] for how it shows us the importance of defending our right to pleasure.” —United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón, NPR’s The Slowdown

“The beauty of Jones’s poems lies in the way they approach death through the pleasures of being alive, deploying a redemptive levity or an acerbic conviviality to lend shape to catastrophe. . . . Passionate and entertaining, Jones’s book etches with fire the ‘alive’ in its title.” —David Woo, Poetry Foundation

“A powerful poetry collection about the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. Jones digs deep into personal and collective histories of grief to confront the perils of white supremacy and the cracked ideological foundation that the United States sits on.” —Chicago Review of Books

“A poetic onslaught of raw emotion—in the best kind of way. . . . Full of powerful moments, each composed of carefully curated words set against a backdrop of the repeated refrain that this is the end of the world. This book feels absolutely necessary right now.” —Anne Mai Yee Jansen, Book Riot

“The potent latest from Jones excoriates an American present that refuses to learn from its past or correct for a possibly disastrous future. A kaleidoscope of grief and anger mixes with the poet’s wit, giving these timely poems a striking directness. . . . This penetrating collection shows Jones at his poetic best.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Jones’s latest is yet another masterly work, though sung in a distinctly different tenor. . . . [His] most free-flowing work yet, a centripetal collection where rage and pain and weariness swirl and coalesce with stunning emotional and conceptual clarity, yet so intimate it feels bled from the author’s very veins.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Jones unravels and reconfigures language like he’s untying a knot, then rethreads the strands in a delicate new construction. . . . Jones writes in the space between wreckage and resilience. He offers a calibrated reckoning with his own grief, cradled in ambiguity—and we wait, holding our breath, to see what is tendered next.” —Erin Overbey, The New Yorker

“Personal and universal, full of grief and sadness but also packed with hope and humor, stylish and entertaining but also profound and touching. The work of Saeed Jones has always been those things, but perhaps never as much as it is in this poetry collection. We knew great work would come from the pandemic, and mixed with his own life, experiences and losses, Jones has delivered what we all knew was coming: beautiful, shining work about the darkness that often envelops us.” —Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“As he did in his memoir and his previous poetry collection, Jones here whips up a dizzying blend of humor, vulnerability and astute social observation to map his place in the world.” —The New York Times

“A serious argument for community and the rebellion of joy. I love [“Alive at the End of the World”] for how it shows us the importance of defending our right to pleasure.” —United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón, NPR’s The Slowdown

“The beauty of Jones’s poems lies in the way they approach death through the pleasures of being alive, deploying a redemptive levity or an acerbic conviviality to lend shape to catastrophe. . . . Passionate and entertaining, Jones’s book etches with fire the ‘alive’ in its title.” —David Woo, Poetry Foundation

“A powerful poetry collection about the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. Jones digs deep into personal and collective histories of grief to confront the perils of white supremacy and the cracked ideological foundation that the United States sits on.” —Chicago Review of Books

“A poetic onslaught of raw emotion—in the best kind of way. . . . Full of powerful moments, each composed of carefully curated words set against a backdrop of the repeated refrain that this is the end of the world. This book feels absolutely necessary right now.” —Anne Mai Yee Jansen, Book Riot

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