If you like ghost stories, wildflowers, and “rhinestoned machine guns”
Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones
VIOLETS’ PICKS 013
Where I found it
At the public library. I go a couple times a month and have for years, but only recently discovered a poetry section. It isn’t labelled, nestled at the end of the aisle between Fiction and Children’s Books. The selection isn’t great, but I’ve picked up a few gems by now and this was one of them. Sidenote: I’ve discovered that there’s something so tactilely pleasing about a softcover poetry book. They usually clock in at under 100 pages which makes them on the thin side for a literary object, but I feel like that makes them less intimidating and so pleasing to have and to hold, yes?
First impressions
When you don’t know anything about the author, you kind of just have to judge the book by its cover. This one has a couple things going for it: I like the cover image and I like the typography, not that I particularly love whatever this style of font is, but because it’s just so different from the standard look and fare of the many poetry books I have seen, which for some reason tend to stray away from making bold statements in design, as if to let the work speak for itself. The cover art, an image of a person in an orange uniform and helmet pushing a sports car in a field in seemingly the middle of nowhere, reflecting the scene on its exterior, is by House of Thought.
They said it
In haunted poems glinting with hard-earned laughter, Saeed Jones confronts the afterlife of his own grief in order to make sense of our shared calamity. Amid the peril of mass shootings, climate change, and systemic failure, he identifies moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt.
—From the publisher
Lines to remember
The end of the world is a boy who doesn’t need to be a real boy to grieve like one. —from “If You Had an Off Button, I’d Name You ‘Off’”
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. —from “After the School Board Meeting”
the autumn air has always been here, lacing our every breath and I love the man who knows I love the sweet-smoke smell of approaching death. —from “Everything Is Dying, Nothing Is Dead”
We weren’t even in the same city, but I felt his heart stab itself like a star falling through me. —from “Performing as Miss Calypso, Maya Angelou Dances Whenever She Forgets the Lyrics, which Billie Holiday, Seated in the Audience, Finds Annoying”
I’m nobody but a lyric for the ghosts quietly growing around the mansion I’ve made of me, like a wilderness of gardenias, rough emeralds, and smashed guitars. —from “All I Gotta Do Is Stay Black and Die (Apocalyptic Remix)”
You might like this if…
You like post-apocalyptic tales and moments of surrealism tied up in history, culture, performance. Endings can mean the end of the world, or the end of a life—sometimes they feel the same to you. You appreciate versatility and creativity in form, and lines that sting just as much as you appreciate lines that make you laugh. You’re a fan of Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, and other Black legends. “Lifetimes are just costume jewelry”? Oof, you get that, get it so deep. At the end of it all, they’ll find you bejewelled and not in some sack.
This was the colour of…
Black and white. Black eyes and black lives and black ice. White teeth and white rabbits and white crack. Blooms and jewels and laughter and lightning. Whatever’s left at the end of the world: A blur of dirt and coffins and abandoned mansions and unsettled dust in the midst of tall grass and wildflowers. The bright hot warm-red of “the last bite of the last good tomato in America”—or sirens.
Details
Year: 2022
Author: Saeed Jones, whose dog Caesar has pretty much taken over his Substack, Werk-In-Progress
Location: Memphis, Tennessee → Lewisville, Texas → Columbus, Ohio
Publisher: Coffee House Press
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
