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Alive at the End of the World

Poems

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Alive at the End of the World

By: Saeed Jones
Narrated by: Saeed Jones
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About this listen

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 audiences toward the realization that the end of the world is already here―and the apocalypse is a state of being.

©2022 Saeed Jones (P)2022 Audible, Inc. African American Death, Grief & Loss Poetry Themes & Styles
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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.

Phenomenal

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