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Alive at the End of the World
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Poetry (2022)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.
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.
104 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 2022
137 people are currently reading
12001 people want to read
About the author
Saeed Jones
6 books1,390 followersSaeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award, and a 2020 Lambda Literary Award. He is also the author of the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 435 reviews
April 21, 2024
‘I’ve made a home out of how much I miss you
and there’s no one here to tell me I should leave’
‘History pretends to forget itself,’ writes Saeed Jones in his piercing new collection Alive at the End of the World, offering a deep investigation into the many ways we shrug off the history of horrors around us. Be in erasure for convenience or in order to keep moving forward, we disremember the past for the sake of the future and Jones would like us to sit in these moments awhile to learn, remember, and pay tribute. Though memory is also stuffed with grief from tragedy and loss of loved ones. With a charming wit, humor and keen eye for emotion, Alive at the End of the World is an instant poetic success that weds the struggle of the past and present through poems that are deeply personal and poems that pay respect to key Black figures of the arts like Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison and Little Richard. This is a collection that will shake you alive and ask you to look around at the world and appreciate that you are still here, alive, at what might often seem the end of the world.
‘The end of the world is a boy who feels all the pain we give him but never bruises, never has a history to show for who happened to him.’
‘I would argue that the end of the world is more of a state of being than a linear event that begins and ends and you can see the edges of it,’ Jones said in conversation with Columbus Monthly, and in keeping with this idea the collection offers multiple ‘ends of the world’. In one, the End of the World is an abusive father who’s children ‘already daydream about the wood grain of his coffin.’ In another the End of the World is a queer nightclub with ‘Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned / machine guns’ keeping guard while pastors lurk outside and ‘vow / that if they ever got inside, they’d burn it all down.’ Dread and the threat of violence is always slinking in the shadows of these poems, ready to strike and h orrific violence happens in the news so frequently it has become ‘just another midday massacre / in America’ he writes in the first of the series of poems titled 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."
This poem succinctly encapsulates so much of the modern horrors of living, such as random violence, mass shootings and white supremacy, and ends with the chilling notion that the catastrophes have become so common as to be shrugged out of memory. ‘History is a gun,’ he writes later in Heritage, ‘and every bullet in its chamber want you / to forget’ and Jones is here to remind us to remember.
‘The end of the world is a boy who doesn’t need to be a real boy to grieve like one.’
The book is divided into four sections, each with another end of the world poem as well as the another chapter in Jone’s prose piece Saeed, or The Other One. This multi-piece work is a surreal tale in which Jone’s writes ‘You’ve got it all wrong. My pain needs me,’ only to be confronted by a physical manifestation of his pain as a second Jones, another being to observe and confront. This recalls some of the passages in his memoir about grief and processing pain through the art of writing, to create ‘a call and response inside the church of us,’ by placing your pain outside yourself. ‘I believed that I could control any story I told,’ he says in How We Fight For Our Lives, ‘if something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting, if you could pin everything to the page afterward.’ And there is much to process in these poems.
‘You died and a decade passed, the: one morning
everyone started dying.’
Grief is a common thread running through the poems, especially over the loss of his mother. One aspect of this collection that really drives it into your heart though is the way Jones can balance the heavy grief with moment of humor, even when discussing sad topics, as in The Dead Dozens:
Your grief is so heavy,
when we lowered the coffin
all the pallbearers fell in too…
You love your mama so much,
Freud came back from the dead
just to study your sorry ass…
The collection becomes a loving tribute to his mother and a struggle with dealing with the grief of her loss and trying to find self-actualization amidst it all. In Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude he states that he ‘somehow has to live on / as your last sentence / uncompleted,’ acknowledging that living on involves being both an expression of family before you (‘shrouded in enough mother echo’) and an individual self. Always wondering ‘who I would become after the sun set / on my last few minutes as your son.’
Though this is difficult as a Black, queer man in America. ‘In this America, how can I call myself a good son and wish my mother, a Black woman, was still here,’ he asks, and the threats against being Black in America abound through this collection. There is the violence, the microaggressions and daily oppression, or even the awkwardness of being the one Black student in a classroom when the subject of slavery comes up. The poem After the School Board Meeting was inspired in part by the book The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and addresses about a real school built on top a Black cemetery Jones tells us in the Notes section following the collection (which is quite robust and just as enjoyable as the poems to be honest), though also is intended to address the gatekeeping implied in the pushbacks across the US about Critical Race Theory:
Somewhere in suburbia, a man-
made creek runs black with junk
we choked on then spat out, tin-can
curses & cracked bones from broken
homes we broke down, paved over
& built our shiny, short-lived lives on.
All the foxes & coyotes have ghosted
our gated, security-guarded imitations
of strite. Our dreams gentrity your night-
mares, & rumor has it, our high school
was built on a Black cemetery. Boo-fucking-hoo.
We pulled ourselves up by your bootstraps,
fucked missionary under a nuclear moon
to get here, and what we've got starts to rol
as soon as we get it. So, I say: Good riddance,
name of the game, "America" is American
for "wreck & repeat." This song isn't comfort;
It's just to help me sleep. "At least, this misery
is mine" I sing in my loaned & lonely dark,
& in the poplar tree outside my window,
a mockingbird sings my song back to me.
The poems also take a deep dive through music history and Black performers to show a world in which Black excellence becomes commodified, owned and appropriated by wealthy white people, quipping ‘I’m Lorne Michaels, I’m the white man who decides whats funny.’ These become wonderful tributes to amazing artists, though it is also heartwrenching . ‘I don’t believe in greatness anymore,’ Jones writes in Song for the Status Quo, 'because glory isn't possible in an America where the cover of a cover of a song that ruined a Black woman’s life can reach me through the radio or hope or a reason…’ Whew.
Saeed Jones knocks it out here and Alive at the End of the World is a stunning collection of poems that will move you, make you think and even make you laugh. If it really is the end of the world, and Timothee Chalamet says he can smell it in the air, than this would be a good book to cozy up with and watch it all go down.
5/5
Alive at the End of the World
I hear the sirens and run
a hand over my silhouette,
surprised not to find bullet
wounds, burns, or history,
but now, ambered under
this streetlight, he pulls me in
for a kiss again and I decide,
briefly, to let the world kill
itself however it chooses: yes,
I hear the sirens and I am their
scream but tonight, I will moan
a future into my man's mouth.
and there’s no one here to tell me I should leave’
‘History pretends to forget itself,’ writes Saeed Jones in his piercing new collection Alive at the End of the World, offering a deep investigation into the many ways we shrug off the history of horrors around us. Be in erasure for convenience or in order to keep moving forward, we disremember the past for the sake of the future and Jones would like us to sit in these moments awhile to learn, remember, and pay tribute. Though memory is also stuffed with grief from tragedy and loss of loved ones. With a charming wit, humor and keen eye for emotion, Alive at the End of the World is an instant poetic success that weds the struggle of the past and present through poems that are deeply personal and poems that pay respect to key Black figures of the arts like Aretha Franklin, Toni Morrison and Little Richard. This is a collection that will shake you alive and ask you to look around at the world and appreciate that you are still here, alive, at what might often seem the end of the world.
‘The end of the world is a boy who feels all the pain we give him but never bruises, never has a history to show for who happened to him.’
‘I would argue that the end of the world is more of a state of being than a linear event that begins and ends and you can see the edges of it,’ Jones said in conversation with Columbus Monthly, and in keeping with this idea the collection offers multiple ‘ends of the world’. In one, the End of the World is an abusive father who’s children ‘already daydream about the wood grain of his coffin.’ In another the End of the World is a queer nightclub with ‘Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned / machine guns’ keeping guard while pastors lurk outside and ‘vow / that if they ever got inside, they’d burn it all down.’ Dread and the threat of violence is always slinking in the shadows of these poems, ready to strike and h orrific violence happens in the news so frequently it has become ‘just another midday massacre / in America’ he writes in the first of the series of poems titled 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."
This poem succinctly encapsulates so much of the modern horrors of living, such as random violence, mass shootings and white supremacy, and ends with the chilling notion that the catastrophes have become so common as to be shrugged out of memory. ‘History is a gun,’ he writes later in Heritage, ‘and every bullet in its chamber want you / to forget’ and Jones is here to remind us to remember.
‘The end of the world is a boy who doesn’t need to be a real boy to grieve like one.’
The book is divided into four sections, each with another end of the world poem as well as the another chapter in Jone’s prose piece Saeed, or The Other One. This multi-piece work is a surreal tale in which Jone’s writes ‘You’ve got it all wrong. My pain needs me,’ only to be confronted by a physical manifestation of his pain as a second Jones, another being to observe and confront. This recalls some of the passages in his memoir about grief and processing pain through the art of writing, to create ‘a call and response inside the church of us,’ by placing your pain outside yourself. ‘I believed that I could control any story I told,’ he says in How We Fight For Our Lives, ‘if something happened, I could write about it, own it, resolve it. Simple. You could afford to be interesting, if you could pin everything to the page afterward.’ And there is much to process in these poems.
‘You died and a decade passed, the: one morning
everyone started dying.’
Grief is a common thread running through the poems, especially over the loss of his mother. One aspect of this collection that really drives it into your heart though is the way Jones can balance the heavy grief with moment of humor, even when discussing sad topics, as in The Dead Dozens:
Your grief is so heavy,
when we lowered the coffin
all the pallbearers fell in too…
You love your mama so much,
Freud came back from the dead
just to study your sorry ass…
The collection becomes a loving tribute to his mother and a struggle with dealing with the grief of her loss and trying to find self-actualization amidst it all. In Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude he states that he ‘somehow has to live on / as your last sentence / uncompleted,’ acknowledging that living on involves being both an expression of family before you (‘shrouded in enough mother echo’) and an individual self. Always wondering ‘who I would become after the sun set / on my last few minutes as your son.’
Though this is difficult as a Black, queer man in America. ‘In this America, how can I call myself a good son and wish my mother, a Black woman, was still here,’ he asks, and the threats against being Black in America abound through this collection. There is the violence, the microaggressions and daily oppression, or even the awkwardness of being the one Black student in a classroom when the subject of slavery comes up. The poem After the School Board Meeting was inspired in part by the book The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and addresses about a real school built on top a Black cemetery Jones tells us in the Notes section following the collection (which is quite robust and just as enjoyable as the poems to be honest), though also is intended to address the gatekeeping implied in the pushbacks across the US about Critical Race Theory:
Somewhere in suburbia, a man-
made creek runs black with junk
we choked on then spat out, tin-can
curses & cracked bones from broken
homes we broke down, paved over
& built our shiny, short-lived lives on.
All the foxes & coyotes have ghosted
our gated, security-guarded imitations
of strite. Our dreams gentrity your night-
mares, & rumor has it, our high school
was built on a Black cemetery. Boo-fucking-hoo.
We pulled ourselves up by your bootstraps,
fucked missionary under a nuclear moon
to get here, and what we've got starts to rol
as soon as we get it. So, I say: Good riddance,
name of the game, "America" is American
for "wreck & repeat." This song isn't comfort;
It's just to help me sleep. "At least, this misery
is mine" I sing in my loaned & lonely dark,
& in the poplar tree outside my window,
a mockingbird sings my song back to me.
The poems also take a deep dive through music history and Black performers to show a world in which Black excellence becomes commodified, owned and appropriated by wealthy white people, quipping ‘I’m Lorne Michaels, I’m the white man who decides whats funny.’ These become wonderful tributes to amazing artists, though it is also heartwrenching . ‘I don’t believe in greatness anymore,’ Jones writes in Song for the Status Quo, 'because glory isn't possible in an America where the cover of a cover of a song that ruined a Black woman’s life can reach me through the radio or hope or a reason…’ Whew.
Saeed Jones knocks it out here and Alive at the End of the World is a stunning collection of poems that will move you, make you think and even make you laugh. If it really is the end of the world, and Timothee Chalamet says he can smell it in the air, than this would be a good book to cozy up with and watch it all go down.
5/5
Alive at the End of the World
I hear the sirens and run
a hand over my silhouette,
surprised not to find bullet
wounds, burns, or history,
but now, ambered under
this streetlight, he pulls me in
for a kiss again and I decide,
briefly, to let the world kill
itself however it chooses: yes,
I hear the sirens and I am their
scream but tonight, I will moan
a future into my man's mouth.
August 12, 2022
Loved this. Usually I feel insecure as I read poems. Not this collection. I felt locked in. Grief. Current events. Black legends. It’s all here. Also the notes at the end added even more to this collection.
December 26, 2022
Winner for best cover of 2022? I really like it.
This is a book of poetry by Saeed Jones, he is a Black and gay American.
He deals mainly with race in this book. It's mainly about navigating the United States as a Black man, being gay is not as focused on. It's really only mentioned in passing. Also, his mother is dead and her death obviously impacted him in a big way. A lot of poems talk about his mother and his struggle to adapt to life without her.
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."
...
HERITAGE
October, 2019 - Oxford, Mississippi
The color of a memory is the difference
between haunted and hunted. In Mississippi,
red white and blue don't mean "remember
this is America." They mean "history is a gun
and every bullet in its chamber wants you
to forget." They mean "we tried our best
not to be America and failed and now we keep
forgetting to forget and anyway, who did you
vote for? No need to ask us. You already know."
They mean the white man in the White House
who tweeted this morning that he's being lynched.
Outside my hotel - no, I'm not from around here -
on the street corner, there is a plaque that tells me
where I can find the body of the town's first white
settler. But it's almost sundown and I've been told
darkness in Mississippi is not a metaphor so I chase
the shadows back into the hotel. At the bar, I beg
the bartender to make me a stronger drink. He tries
and he fails. I'm scared and Black and mostly sober
at the hotel bar and reading an essay about lynching
when some Ole Miss frat boys explode into the room,
cheering in a dead language, and my heart doesn't
even wait for me to get the check. My heart is already
gone. My heart is cowering in the hallway in front
of my hotel room because I have the key and I just
now got the check and I keep forgetting to forget
that the America I was born in will not be
the America in which I die.
A good thing also about this poetry collection is that at the end of the book Jones includes backgrounds for all the poems. What they were inspired by. What he was thinking about when he wrote them. Etc.
TL;DR Interesting book of poetry. Jones makes some good points and he crafts some good poetry and ideas. I would recommend it if you are interested in a modern book of poetry revolving around Black American life.
This is a book of poetry by Saeed Jones, he is a Black and gay American.
He deals mainly with race in this book. It's mainly about navigating the United States as a Black man, being gay is not as focused on. It's really only mentioned in passing. Also, his mother is dead and her death obviously impacted him in a big way. A lot of poems talk about his mother and his struggle to adapt to life without her.
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."
...
HERITAGE
October, 2019 - Oxford, Mississippi
The color of a memory is the difference
between haunted and hunted. In Mississippi,
red white and blue don't mean "remember
this is America." They mean "history is a gun
and every bullet in its chamber wants you
to forget." They mean "we tried our best
not to be America and failed and now we keep
forgetting to forget and anyway, who did you
vote for? No need to ask us. You already know."
They mean the white man in the White House
who tweeted this morning that he's being lynched.
Outside my hotel - no, I'm not from around here -
on the street corner, there is a plaque that tells me
where I can find the body of the town's first white
settler. But it's almost sundown and I've been told
darkness in Mississippi is not a metaphor so I chase
the shadows back into the hotel. At the bar, I beg
the bartender to make me a stronger drink. He tries
and he fails. I'm scared and Black and mostly sober
at the hotel bar and reading an essay about lynching
when some Ole Miss frat boys explode into the room,
cheering in a dead language, and my heart doesn't
even wait for me to get the check. My heart is already
gone. My heart is cowering in the hallway in front
of my hotel room because I have the key and I just
now got the check and I keep forgetting to forget
that the America I was born in will not be
the America in which I die.
A good thing also about this poetry collection is that at the end of the book Jones includes backgrounds for all the poems. What they were inspired by. What he was thinking about when he wrote them. Etc.
TL;DR Interesting book of poetry. Jones makes some good points and he crafts some good poetry and ideas. I would recommend it if you are interested in a modern book of poetry revolving around Black American life.
Read
March 3, 2025great collection of course
August 23, 2022
Brilliant collection from one of the greats.
January 29, 2025
Death and grief and anger are prevalent themes in the poems of Saeed Jones's book "Alive at the End of the World".
Topics as timely and tragic as the George Floyd murder, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the existence of Donald Trump, the history of lynching in the U.S., lives of black people, lives of gay people, Maya Angelou's short-lived music career, capitalism, the pandemic, Little Richard getting screwed by the record company, the potential for AI to destroy the world and then feel really sad about it but unable to shed actual tears because it's a computer, Pat Boone's success, Paul Mooney's death, and the death of Jones's mother provide a rich tapestry of pain in lyrical form.
Jones's poetry, while beautiful, may not be easily accessible to those who don't read a lot of poetry (like me), but a section at the back of the book where he "explains" the origins of some of his poems is extremely helpful.
Topics as timely and tragic as the George Floyd murder, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the existence of Donald Trump, the history of lynching in the U.S., lives of black people, lives of gay people, Maya Angelou's short-lived music career, capitalism, the pandemic, Little Richard getting screwed by the record company, the potential for AI to destroy the world and then feel really sad about it but unable to shed actual tears because it's a computer, Pat Boone's success, Paul Mooney's death, and the death of Jones's mother provide a rich tapestry of pain in lyrical form.
Jones's poetry, while beautiful, may not be easily accessible to those who don't read a lot of poetry (like me), but a section at the back of the book where he "explains" the origins of some of his poems is extremely helpful.
February 20, 2023
Powerful work from this always compelling poet.
December 3, 2022
Alive at the End of the World
The End of the World was a nightclub.
Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned
machine guns guarded the red and impassable
door on Friday nights. Just a look at the crowd,
all dressed up and swaying outside, made people
want to yell the truth about themselves to anyone
Review to follow.
The End of the World was a nightclub.
Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned
machine guns guarded the red and impassable
door on Friday nights. Just a look at the crowd,
all dressed up and swaying outside, made people
want to yell the truth about themselves to anyone
Review to follow.
Want to read
October 28, 2022Did the Photoshop subscription run out when this cover was due because what is that
May 11, 2023
Rec. by: David
Rec. for: Fellow survivors of the ongoing apocalypse
All we have are words.
What better way to follow up on Chuck Wendig's big ol' end-of-the-world novel Wayward, than with a slim volume of poems under a similarly-apocalyptic title? And that cover—what a science-fictional image! It reminded me of the pastoral surrealism in Simon Stålenhag's hyperrealistic paintings, but it's actually artwork by artist and photojournalist Lola Flash.
The poems in Saeed Jones' Alive at the End of the World do sometimes have science-fictional aspects, post-apocalyptic grace notes, but they are grounded in the present—and the past—in memories of his mother and in his experience as a Black man in America. When, for example, Jones says,
Saeed Jones (whom you may have seen on the late BuzzFeed News) doesn't use the wrong words. I appreciated subtleties, like the comma at the end of "That's Not Snow, It's Ash" (p.7). And the final section of "If You Had an Off Button, I'd Name You 'Off'" (Part V, p.12) could (did) make a grown man weep.
This I feel too, as I enter my sixth decade upon this Earth:
Are words all we have?
I know that as a white man the apparatus of the state would be mine to call upon—I would never shoot someone, but I might well have someone shot. Accidentally, even, if I use the wrong words.
I cannot pretend to rival Jones, but his poems did inspire me to pale imitation. I hope these aren't the wrong words:
Saeed Jones doesn't use the wrong words. It bears repeating, as Jones himself repeats the title "Alive at the End of the World" for several different poems within Alive at the End of the World.
Words are all we have.
I can't be Black with Jones. I can't be queer alongside him either. But I can be with him.
Jones ends this volume with some words about his poems, many of which turn out to be nonfictional. Which is no surprise—I think we're all coming to know what it's like to be alive at the end of the world.
Rec. for: Fellow survivors of the ongoing apocalypse
All we have are words.
What better way to follow up on Chuck Wendig's big ol' end-of-the-world novel Wayward, than with a slim volume of poems under a similarly-apocalyptic title? And that cover—what a science-fictional image! It reminded me of the pastoral surrealism in Simon Stålenhag's hyperrealistic paintings, but it's actually artwork by artist and photojournalist Lola Flash.
The poems in Saeed Jones' Alive at the End of the World do sometimes have science-fictional aspects, post-apocalyptic grace notes, but they are grounded in the present—and the past—in memories of his mother and in his experience as a Black man in America. When, for example, Jones says,
Let the pale reporters and their pointed questions about beingEven a dumb white guy knows he's not talking about fruit.
"the first and only" hang from trees like the warnings they are.
—"Diahann Carroll Takes a Bath at the Beverly Hills Hotel," p.37
Saeed Jones (whom you may have seen on the late BuzzFeed News) doesn't use the wrong words. I appreciated subtleties, like the comma at the end of "That's Not Snow, It's Ash" (p.7). And the final section of "If You Had an Off Button, I'd Name You 'Off'" (Part V, p.12) could (did) make a grown man weep.
This I feel too, as I enter my sixth decade upon this Earth:
I grieve the bodies I thought beneath me and the body I became.
—"Grief #346," p.57
Are words all we have?
I know that as a white man the apparatus of the state would be mine to call upon—I would never shoot someone, but I might well have someone shot. Accidentally, even, if I use the wrong words.
I cannot pretend to rival Jones, but his poems did inspire me to pale imitation. I hope these aren't the wrong words:
Deposition
I sit here at the intersection of White Street and Bland Avenue, waiting for the Stop sign to change,
When Mr. Jones rolls by in a parked car (get your stories straight, man!),
Hanging something dark and dangerous out the window:
"You look hungry. Why not eat these words?"
So of course I had to.
It was simple self-defense.
Saeed Jones doesn't use the wrong words. It bears repeating, as Jones himself repeats the title "Alive at the End of the World" for several different poems within Alive at the End of the World.
Words are all we have.
I can't be Black with Jones. I can't be queer alongside him either. But I can be with him.
Jones ends this volume with some words about his poems, many of which turn out to be nonfictional. Which is no surprise—I think we're all coming to know what it's like to be alive at the end of the world.
August 13, 2024
A phenomenally powerful and emotional collection discussing and confronting modern America, racism, exploitation of Black art by white people, Queerness, but more than anything else grief. Grief for all these things and the ten year anniversary of the death of his mother.
I'm sick and mush-brained after therapy, so I really don't know what else to say, beyond finding this collection beautiful, exacting, tragic, and incredibly impactful.
I will return to this collection in the future and hopefully have more cogent thoughts.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author, which was phenomenal.
I'm sick and mush-brained after therapy, so I really don't know what else to say, beyond finding this collection beautiful, exacting, tragic, and incredibly impactful.
I will return to this collection in the future and hopefully have more cogent thoughts.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author, which was phenomenal.
February 29, 2024
“When a Venus flytrap flowers, the two white blossoms sit atop a very tall stalk. Green teeth way down at the bottom. It’s trying to avoid triggering its own traps. It’s trying to keep the bees it needs for pollination away from its own traps. I’m most dangerous when I’m hungry. I’m most hungry when I’m hurting. Seems like I’m always hurting.”
[pushing through the crowd screaming louder than everyone else] SAEED JONES IM YOUR BIGGEST FAN
[pushing through the crowd screaming louder than everyone else] SAEED JONES IM YOUR BIGGEST FAN
December 5, 2022
Absolutely outstanding!
December 4, 2024
4.6/5.0
I really enjoyed the depths that Saeed Jones took with this collection of work. The reference points of his words and how they are curated in a way to bring readers closer to the goal of understanding what his purpose in writing these pieces are was a brilliant immersive experience in this book.
I really enjoyed the depths that Saeed Jones took with this collection of work. The reference points of his words and how they are curated in a way to bring readers closer to the goal of understanding what his purpose in writing these pieces are was a brilliant immersive experience in this book.
September 27, 2022
Saeed Jones is a remarkable writer and his latest poetry collection, Alive At the End of the World, reflects a poet creating the best work of his career. This is an outstanding body of work. These poems reckon with grief, the kind of grief that lingers and subsumes a person no matter how hard they try to escape it. There are so many wonderful lines throughout the collection. The poems take a range of forms and it's wonderful to see the formal versatility, so many different ways of expressing the difficult truths of this work. I cannot recommend this book enough.
April 9, 2024
Alive At The End Of The World is a collection of poems brilliantly crafted and woven together. Saeed Jones, who I first became familiar with as a listener to Vibe Check (podcast), leans into his grief, both personal and collective. The subject matter is undoubtedly heavy and thought-provoking. Throughout the book, Jones scrutinizes the way systemic injustice has enveloped his life, which leads to the heart of the piece- he finds himself perpetually alive at the end of the world. Saeed’s sharp, often sardonic, voice comes through as he chronicles a cyclical doom. As someone who typically shies away from picking up poetry, I found this collection quite approachable. My favorite poems were: After the School Board Meeting, A Stranger, and Grief #1.
April 29, 2024
It's worth picking up this book for the beautiful, provocative cover alone. It's, of course, also worth reading it to learn how one person processes grief. Grief about his mother's passing and grief about the way Black bodies are and have been treated in the U.S. are the main themes of Jones's poems. Some of them reference Black celebrities. Of those, I most enjoyed "A Difficult Love Song for Luther Vandross." In the notes at the end of the book Jones writes, "The poem is intended to be difficult to read out loud as a nod to the fact that Vandross was notoriously exacting about enunciation of lyrics."
March 11, 2025
I'm not a huge modern poetry person, but I adore Saeed Jones and I really enjoyed this collection. I think my favorite poem was probably one of the first ones, but what really makes this book sing is when it is taken truly as a collection of work in conversation with each other.
November 27, 2022
Ooof, I have missed Saeed Jones every day since I read the last page of How We Fight For Our Lives and slowly closed the book with tears falling down my face. My favorites in this collection were: A Song for the Status Quo; Saeed, How Dare You Make Your Mother into a Prelude; Heritage; "Sorry as in Pathetic"; Date Night; The Essential American Worker; A Spell to Banish Grief; and every Saeed: or The Other One addition. Jones's focus on grief is the cornerstone of this memoir (he interrogates himself, answering a reader's question: "Do you think you need your pain in order to write?") and ultimately to me, he settles on: this is what he wants to write for himself ("I don't want to go out there for them"). Jones's writing is honest, raw. Whenever he writes about his mother I feel my throat and chest tighten. I would love for him to write more memoir-like nonfiction.
April 14, 2024
You should definitely read this book. I dont know much about poetry and I am definitely not qualifief to offer any analysis, certainly not on a collection written by a queer, black man. But this collection about grief, depression, police brutality, mass shootings, being black, being queer, is excellent and you should read this book. Thanks for the rec, Kelci!
Read
January 14, 2024“You don’t get to decide when an experience is done with you.”
November 22, 2022
You have to read this whole book cover to cover in one sitting.
December 17, 2022
I'm not a huge poetry reader, but completely connected with this collection, so I think it's very accessible if you also don't pick up much poetry. Through poetry and flash fiction Jones explores surviving through challenges from race and class and sexuality and loss. I also love the elements this incorporated from pop culture and subtly speculative to communicate to the reader. I'm not sure from a form perspective I got it, but there is an aspect of challenging the reader I think, where line breaks are exclusively unnatural, uncomfortable.
November 19, 2022
saeed jones never misses. these poems were raw and beautiful and emotional. i reread them while i was reading them because i just needed to feel them again.
September 29, 2022
Alive at the End of the World thinks through various states of being (black, queer, orphan) during the supposed end of the world. The paradoxical nature of this premise is not lost on Jones, who looks at the end of the world not as apocalyptic (per se), but more along the lines of the world having always been witness to various forms of death. Consider the following lines from one of the eponymous poems:
This expansive and malleable definition also allows Jones to focus on something a bit more urgent than impending doom: Grief. Here, it is seen as the intersection of living and apocalypse, a by-product of surviving one’s own death, but not quite one’s loved ones (such as one’s mother). The Dead Dozens’ starting lines (also noted by D.A. Powell in his introduction) are exemplary:
Jones skillfully uses this dark humor to fling the poems, to make orphanhood as complex and vivid and gut-wrenching as Collins’ Autopsy, and even to roll-call a bunch of dead black folks (while staying very much on theme): Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Maya Angelou, Little Richard, Diahann Caroll, and Aretha Franklin, to name a few.
Impressive collection. Looking forward to reading Prelude to Bruise .
The End of the World loved us
like a father who bagged about the broken
roof he kept overhead whenever we'd complain
about the night air watching us sleep,
or whenever we'd wince at this reach
This expansive and malleable definition also allows Jones to focus on something a bit more urgent than impending doom: Grief. Here, it is seen as the intersection of living and apocalypse, a by-product of surviving one’s own death, but not quite one’s loved ones (such as one’s mother). The Dead Dozens’ starting lines (also noted by D.A. Powell in his introduction) are exemplary:
Your grief is so heavy,
when we lowered the coffin,
all the pallbearers fell in too.
Jones skillfully uses this dark humor to fling the poems, to make orphanhood as complex and vivid and gut-wrenching as Collins’ Autopsy, and even to roll-call a bunch of dead black folks (while staying very much on theme): Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Maya Angelou, Little Richard, Diahann Caroll, and Aretha Franklin, to name a few.
Impressive collection. Looking forward to reading Prelude to Bruise .
October 22, 2022
An immensely moving collection with some of the most beautiful lines I’ve ever read on grief.
October 12, 2022
Finally, 1/few of the good books in contemporary poetry! Some shattered me, some left me unable to speak. What is it about grief that we can only feel so much yet not be able to say how we feel?
January 20, 2023
Stars 4/5
Probably the most digestible poetry I've ever read, but still full of really beautiful prose. It was powerful and straight to the point but also full of satire and clever metaphors. A lot of the subject matter was pretty devastating, a little difficult to read but very important.
And my favourite poem was probably 'Saeed, or The Other One IV', the concept of the question carrying throughout most of the collection to be finally concluded with this beautiful metaphor about coming out of the woods - literally the perfect ending.
Probably the most digestible poetry I've ever read, but still full of really beautiful prose. It was powerful and straight to the point but also full of satire and clever metaphors. A lot of the subject matter was pretty devastating, a little difficult to read but very important.
And my favourite poem was probably 'Saeed, or The Other One IV', the concept of the question carrying throughout most of the collection to be finally concluded with this beautiful metaphor about coming out of the woods - literally the perfect ending.
June 18, 2024
“but now, ambered under this streetlight, he pulls me in for a kiss again and I decide, briefly, to let the world kill itself however it chooses: yes, I hear the sirens and I am their scream but tonight, I will moan a future into my man's mouth”
January 1, 2023
Damn, this really cut me deep. Grief is such a funny thing.
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