Alive at the End of the World

The apocalypse that descends over Saeed Jones’s second collection, Alive at the End of the World, is local and personal. “The End of the World was a nightclub,” writes Jones, recalling the horror of Pulse, but in his scene “Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned // machine guns” guard the door. In Jones’s intimate versions of doomsday, the end is “just another midday massacre / in America,” a self-involved father, a dress the speaker makes “out of the names I live to inflict // on myself.” It’s the daily cruelties of being Black and queer in America, where the sound of sirens leads the speaker to run a hand over his body, “surprised not to find bullet / wounds, burns, or history.” What saves him is the choice that people make each day, “to let the world kill // itself however it chooses,” and, in his case, to “moan / a future into my man’s mouth.”

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. In “The Dead Dozens,” a poem mourning his late mother, the punchlines drive home the grimness of mortality and racism:

Your grief is so heavy,
when we lowered the coffin, 
all the pallbearers fell in too.

Your grief is so heavy,
when you cried your last good-bye, the end
of the world said “nigga, get off me!”

Jones hoists the pall of death until he exposes a “man in pain, / naked in the middle of the street,” or the author who, after a too-probing question by a white man at a reading (“Do you think you need your pain in order to write?”), encounters his own doppelgänger, who may be “a white policeman’s description of me”—or just the pain he needs to write. Passionate and entertaining, Jones’s book etches with fire the “alive” in its title, “burning through what little love / we have left.”