Saeed JonesRezensionen

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 "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.

A collection suffused with physicality, which begins with a prologue poem of incarnation, one of my favorites in the volume: Heard you crack open the field's skull/where you landed.//Halo of smoke ruined the sky/and you were a body now//naked and bruised in the cratered cotton./Could have been a meteorite//except for those strip-mined eyes, each/a point of fossilized night.//Bringing water and a blanket,/I asked, "Which of your lives is this,//third or fifth?" Your answer, blues/a breeze to soak my clothes//in tears.

After the prologue the poems are divided up into four sections, after which follows a couple of codas. In the first section, home, childhood, breaking free. Red is at the end of black. Pitch-black unthreads/and swings garnet//in what I thought was home. I'm climbing/out of my father.

In the second, racial and sexual awakening, and self-loathing. In "Jasper, 1998", on the dragging death of James Byrd, Jr.: I speak/in the language of sharp turns. ... Hear me, Jasper./Hear me for miles. About a lover, in "He Thinks He Can Leave Me": and his darkness/mistakes me//for sunrise.

In the third, unsuccessful relationships, and struggling with loneliness. Straight, no chaser, a joke in our bed/but I stopped laughing; all those empty bottles,//kitchen counters covered with beer cans/and broken glasses. To realize you drank//so you could face me the morning after,/the only way to choke down rage at the body//sleeping beside you. What did I know/of your father's backhand or the pine casket//he threatened to put you in? Then, In my empty bed, I dreamed//the record's needle pointed into my back,/spinning me into no one's song.

In the fourth: death. In "Mississippi Drowning", Let me show you how//to make your lungs/a home for minnows, how//to let them flicker//like silver//in and out of your mouth/like last words..., and in "Hour Between Dog & Wolf", In an hour colored tourmaline, I mistake your guitar/for a body in sleep and smash you into effigy,//splinter your way back into my skin.

The coda gives us "History, According to Boy" which reads as an autobiographical prose-poem of growing up black and gay, and finally "Last Portrait as Boy", which hopefully signals growth beyond the hard struggle witnessed thus far, summarized in one of the earlier poems as Half this life I've spent falling out of fourth-story windows.

Strong and enjoyable collection.

Heartbreaking and uplifting. A coming-of-age story and a portrait of filial love.

Excellent. The collection is put together well, and there are several stand-out pieces. The few I'd read in publications before this were just as good again, and important to the overall narrative. For some reason the poem about kudzu is the one haunting my memory right now.

Compelling and Beautiful Memoir

I've followed Saeed Jones on Twitter for a while now and preordered this book. It happened to be released on my mother's birthday, the day I spend remembering her and grieving her loss. This book was hard to read in all the best ways.

How We Fight for Our Lives is an autobiographical tale of a young man facing the challenges of his own sexual identity, the expectations and judgments of his traditional family, the pains of poverty, and the difficulties of racism. It's an OK book, but certainly nothing special. The writing is good and the presentation makes the story moderately interesting. It is not a "coming-of-age" book, but one that instead deals with the aftermath of coming-of-age, entering adulthood and negotiating a place within it.
I don't really have much to say about it other than that. I just sort of wish I had spent the time reading something more engaging and worthwhile.

There's something soulless about the author until the last quarter of this small memoir. Jones' rage, anger and anxiety seem to have no source, at least not according to the history he presents. I found his self-destructive nihilism disturbing. His gift for writing is not as incandescent as I'd hoped, but in places he is quite eloquent.

Wow ... I didn’t know what I was expecting from this memoir but this was so much more. It’s the story of the author’s life told by navigating through important moments of his life and the ultimate thread overall is his relationship with his beloved single mother.

You can clearly see Jones is a poet because even his prose is stunningly beautiful and evocative - literally brimming with feelings like desperation, confusion, longing, fear and grief - and listening to the audiobook in his own voice brings even more life to it. I thought his particular fear about the ramifications of being both Black and gay was very palpable in his words and I could feel it myself. It really broke my heart. I was so lost in his words that I didn’t realize it was already over, and I just wanted to know more.

This memoir truly deserves all the accolades it’s getting across the community and I hope everyone picks this up. I’m not much of a poetry reader but I definitely wanna go back and checkout his previous award winning poetry books.

For a memoir to rate so highly from me is unusual. Maybe the fact that it's short helped. [Most people's lives aren't so interesting to others that they merit more than 200–300 pages.]

Pro: relationships with his mother and grandmother; candid portrayal of his feelings of self-worth, how he treated himself, and how he allowed others to treat him and change him/how he interacted with them; moments of humor; commentary on systemic racism's role in his family's lives; an experience shared with an unrelated woman he met while traveling.

Content warning: There were scenes including explicit sex, violence, and sexual violence. [This made me pause in deciding whether to continue/how to rate. Ultimately, I didn't factor it into my rating. That is, the book would not have been a five-star book if those scenes were omitted.]

This short memoir offers a glimpse into the life of a man at the intersection of both his Blackness and his queerness as he comes of age. The writing is smooth and sometimes lyrical (Jones is a poet too), and I feel like he conveyed, in a short space, a lot about his experience at that intersection.

Feels like the nephew of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Frank Conroy's "Stop Time" I friggin loved it.

What can I say that hasn't already been said? It's lovely. The last chapter is one of the loveliest tributes I've read to a beloved mother. It reads both as a collection of essays and an eloquent whole. It is very personal and intimate and reaches out at the same time. Jones has written a lovely treasure of a book.

i love crying

This is the only kind of memoir I want to read; it's short, it's focused and to the point, and it's excellently written.

Just really fucking gorgeous. I was uncertain about it at the start, and then the shift happened two-thirds of the way through and I was completely hooked and could not put it down until I finished it. There's so much here to unpack and work through, and I know I will be buying a copy of this as soon as possible (I got it from the library.) Really not much more I can say about this other than it hit me in all the right places and I'm really glad I read it.

How We Fight For Our Lives is a marvelous memoir written in chapters that function as individual essays. Saeed Jones tells us about growing up a gay Black boy in Texas, his relationships with his mother and grandmother, and his age of exploration as a young man in college. A coming-of-age memoir, it is also the story of his love for his mother and how she shaped him.

One of the most shocking moments in the memoir is when his grandmother takes him to church. It’s clear she has talked to the pastor, expressing her concern that her young grandson is too worldly (too gay) and asking him to pray for him. The pastor calls down illness upon his mother because her Buddhist faith is blamed for his problems. Since his mother had heart problems, this seemed impossibly wrong. It is not bad enough the world is against him for being Black and being gay, his family is failing him, too.

He describes this so delicately, “People don’t just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn’t exist until we are able to say, “I am no longer yours.” My grandmother and I, without knowing it, were faithfully following a script that had already been written for us. A woman raises a boy into a man, loving him so intensely that her commitment finally repulses him.”

Of course, your family is family and forgiveness can be found…even when people don’t ask for it.

How We Fight For Our Lives is beautifully written. Jones has a poet’s felicity with language. His writing is beautiful. At times it is brutal as when he talks about his risk-taking sexual adventures. Other times it is delicate, as in the description of what passed with his grandmother. It is always honest and blunt.

I am not a straight white woman and Jones is a gay Black man. We are biographical antipodes, but he writes so well, it does not matter. I loved his stories. I admire his compassion and his drive to succeed. He dreamed of going to New York City, but when he could not afford the tuition for NYU, he adjusted, seeking a school that gave him a full scholarship and deferring the New York dream to his postgraduate career. This is a mature man, a wise man, and he wrote a loving memoir of his family and of fighting for his life.

I received an e-galley of How We Fight For Our Lives from the publisher through NetGalley

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2019/10/31/9781501132735/

"Being black can get you killed
Being gay can get you killed
Being a black gay boy is a death wish"

So Saeed Jones understands the challenges he faces as a young man. This memoir follows his evolution into adulthood coming to terms with his sexuality, race, and especially the troubled relationship with his mother. The memoir captures the extreme risks he takes to explore his sexuality. One wonders why he didn't find more satisfying partners as a young man and only hopes that this will eventually happen for him. His relationship with his mother is especially poignant as it evokes the all too common black mother struggling to raise and protect her children alone in a world that views them with hostility. Only after her death does he come to appreciate her importance to his development. Meeting the old woman in Barcelona is a powerful metaphor for his relationship with his mother. Memoirs written by young people can be unsatisfying reads because of the lack of a wider life experience. Certainly, this seems to be a problem here, but Saeed copes remarkably well.

To say that Saeed Jones is intense, is an understatement. Just when I think that I cannot have a more emotional response to a poem, the next poem hits me in the guts again. I am not one to typically read a book of poetry, but I am glad this one fell into my lap when it did. Dealing with gender, race, and loss, Jones' poems take readers on an emotional tailspin if you take the time to listen. Poetry isn't for everyone, but this is poetry worth reading.

For a more detailed reflection on Saeed Jones' Prelude to Bruise

When does the gene that allows one to enjoy poetry kick in? I just don't get it. I see that this collection is good, I see that there are some striking images, I see that much of it is powerful. But it doesn't resonate with me or effect me much. I looked up Saeed Jones when I picked up this collection off my shelf, and I ended up reading one of his essays online. And OMG, give me more of *that*. The medium of poetry just doesn't work for me, I guess. If it works for you, get you a copy of this collection. Because you, I think, will love it.

6 out of 5.

I didn't exactly mean to survive myself.
-- "Post-Apocalyptic Heartbeat"

Because I follow Saeed on Twitter, I happened to see a tweet a little while back where he said "I'm really glad I didn't kill myself in 2011. It's good to still be here." and having read this collection... I suppose, all I can say is that I'm really glad, too. These poems are so full of power and emotion that they can be a little scary sometimes - a little intimidating - but they're not only some of the best poems I've ever read... they're some of the best things I've ever read period. If you're a nerd like me, you can have fun watching him use septameter and then breaking the meter (see: "Thralldom II") or doing any sorts of other linguistic tricks - and if you're just a passing traveler, read "Boy in a Whalebone Corset". Actually, pick any poem and you'll find something to appreciate and enjoy, whether you're a poetry fan or not. This is a beautiful, haunting, nearly perfect collection.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/02/27/prelude-to-bruise/

6 out of 5.

I didn't exactly mean to survive myself.
-- "Post-Apocalyptic Heartbeat"

Because I follow Saeed on Twitter, I happened to see a tweet a little while back where he said "I'm really glad I didn't kill myself in 2011. It's good to still be here." and having read this collection... I suppose, all I can say is that I'm really glad, too. These poems are so full of power and emotion that they can be a little scary sometimes - a little intimidating - but they're not only some of the best poems I've ever read... they're some of the best things I've ever read period. If you're a nerd like me, you can have fun watching him use septameter and then breaking the meter (see: "Thralldom II") or doing any sorts of other linguistic tricks - and if you're just a passing traveler, read "Boy in a Whalebone Corset". Actually, pick any poem and you'll find something to appreciate and enjoy, whether you're a poetry fan or not. This is a beautiful, haunting, nearly perfect collection.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/02/27/prelude-to-bruise/

NA

.