Alive at the End of the World

by Saeed Jones, D. A. Powell (Foreword by)

Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566896528
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Saeed Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and GQ, and he has been featured on public radio programs including NPR’s Fresh Air, Pop Culture Happy Hour, It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders, and All Things Considered. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his dog, Caesar, and tweets @TheFerocity.

Table of Contents

Foreword D. A. Powell vii

Alive at the End of the World 1

Alive at the End of the World 5

A Memory 6

That's Not Snow, It's Ash 7

If You Had an Off Button, I'd Name You "Off" 8

A Song for the Status Quo 13

All I Gotta Do Is Stay Black and Die 14

It's 1975 and Paul Mooney Says "Nigger" a Hundred Times 15

Deleted Voice Message: Hey, Robyn-It's Me, Whitney 17

Grief #213 18

Saeed, or The Other One: I 19

Alive at the End of the World 25

Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude 27

Saeed Wonders If the Poem You Just Read Would've Been Better Served by a Different Title 28

Heritage 29

After the School Board Meeting 30

Black Ice 31

The Trial 32

Gravity 34

Aretha Franklin Hears an Echo While Singing "Save Me" 35

Diahann Carroll Takes a Bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel 37

Grief#913 38

Saeed, or the Other One: II 39

Alive at the End of the World 45

"Sorry as in Pathetic" 46

A Stranger 47

Okay, One More Story 48

Okay, One More Story 49

Date Night 50

The Essential American Worker 52

Against Progeny 53

A Difficult Love Song for Luther Vandross 54

Little Richard Listens to Pat Boone Sing "Tutti Frutti" 56

Grief #346 57

Saeed, or The Other One: III 58

Alive at the End of the World 63

Extinction 64

Everything Is Dying, Nothing Is Dead 65

A Spell to Banish Grief 66

The Dead Dozens 67

After Watching a Video of Cicely Tyson Singing a Hymn, I Realize I Wasn't a Good Grandson 68

Performing as Miss Calypso, Maya Angelou Dances Whenever She Forgets the Lyrics, which Billie Holiday, Seated in the Audience, Finds Annoying 69

At 84 Years Old, Toni Morrison Wonders If She's Depressed 70

All I Gotta Do Is Stay Black and Die (Apocalyptic Remix) 71

Grief #1 72

Saeed, or The Other One: IV 73

Notes at the End of the World 77

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Alive at the End of the World

Winner of the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
An NPR Best Book of 2022
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022
An American Library Association 2023 Notable Book
An Oprah Daily Best Memoir of 2022
A Book Riot Best Poetry Collection of 2022
An Electric Literature Favorite Poetry Collection of 2022
A Tor.com Best Book of 2022
A Them Favorite Book of 2022

“This penetrating collection shows Jones at his poetic best.” —Publishers Weekly starred review

“Jones’s 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.” —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

“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

From the Publisher