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Alive at the End of the World

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

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.

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  • Accessibility

    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

    Summary

    A Simple book with some images, lists, and basic formatting, which are defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of content, page-list, landmark, reading order, Structural Navigation, and semantic structure.

    Ways Of Reading

    • Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and font size, spaces between paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, as well as color of background and text).

    • All content can be read as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

    • Has alternative text descriptions for images.

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    Navigation

    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

    • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation.

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    • The publication contains no hazards.

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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 15, 2022
      The potent latest from Jones (Prelude to Bruise) 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: “In America, a gathering of people/ is called target practice or a funeral,/ depending on who lives long enough/ to define the terms.” The stakes rise with each poem. Channeling the voices of deceased Black celebrities like Aretha Franklin, Jones engages the reader in a frank conversation about Black life as entertainment value: “you said you wanted me to make/ you feel good or holy or respected/ or natural, woman, don’t you know/ I am made of how I make you feel/ or don’t.” Ecological collapse also comes into play, as in the poem “Extinction,” which puns on “pray,” making the threat disarmingly personal: “Prey me long forgotten/ before one of us swallows// the last bite of the last/ good tomato in America.” Balancing elegy with gallows humor, this penetrating collection shows Jones at his poetic best.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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