Saeed Jones

If you are the kind of person who has an interest in reading queer Black poetry, you are already aware of this book, as I was. And even if you have never heard of this book before, I don't know how your attention could not be grabbed by this cover!

The title should give you a clue that this is a book of heartbreak. It is haunted by the loss of Saeed's mother, but also by mass shootings, prejudice, and the loss of cultural icons like Whitney Houston and Toni Morrison. In much of the poetry by show more gay men I have read, women appear only incidentally, but women are loved here, respected, mourned.

Time has passed, and while there are moments of laughter, of joy, this poetry is still waist deep in grieving. My favorite poem here, "The Dead Dozens," has stanzas like:

You love your mama so much,
Freud came back from the dead
just to study your sorry ass.

You love your mama so much,
when she died, our mamas died too.
some of our favorite aunties caught strays.

This is not a "someday it won't hurt quite as much" response to grieving. It's a "someday, may you find a way to honor your grieving. To understand it, make friends with it, and walk out with it to face the world." show less

What to say? It is perfect. It is both raw and polished, the language beautiful but not al all precious. A memoir of coming of age as a Gay Black boy, of becoming a man, of loving the complicated and beautiful mother who cared for him, but not herself. In the end, this is a love letter to his mother, because of her faults rather than despite them, which is not where I thought it was going.

"You never forget your first "faggot." Because the memory, in its way, makes you. It becomes the spine show more for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on. Before you were just scrawny; now you're scrawny because you're a faggot. Before you were just bookish; now you're bookish because you're a faggot."

"If standing over the unconscious body of a man who, just moments before, had tried to bash my head in is the closest I will ever come to feeling like a god, I can understand how a god might look down at mortal man and love him all the more, precisely because of his vulnerability."

"She started to pull away before I could even register whether to laugh or to chase her down with the thousand questions still on my mind. We did this to one another, shocking each other to distract both of us from an impending ache. It worked, in a sense, I just stood in the empty parking space, noticing the air was thick with the chatter of cicadas. It hadn't occurred to me how much I would miss her until she was already gone." show less

A beautiful memoir, written in prose but clearly by a poet which shines through in the language, narrative voice, and how the story weaves through time and experience. It's the story of growing up and becoming oneself while gay, Black, and poor, but a "coming of age" experience that feels deeply familiar even outside these identities, in a way I don't find in most coming of age stories. A very quick read but I forced myself to slow down so I could sit with the book for more days. This book show more is a beautiful gift to the world! show less

Beautiful and tragic. The first poem, Alive at the End of the World , really punched me in the gut, reading it shortly after the tragedy and trauma of Club Q. I knew, immediately, that I would need to take time to digest each poem, and I was correct. Each poem is powerful, emotional, the words weighted with meaning and the spaces that linger between the poems significant.

These poems will challenge you to to reexamine your what you think you know about heteronormativity, our culture of show more "respectability" as it relates to white supremacy and politics, and continued murders of Black people.

Please, if you read these poems, take time with them, spend time with the words, feel them. show less