Saeed Jones
Författare till How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir
Om författaren
Foto taget av: Saeed Jones at BookExpo at the Javits Center in New York City, May 2019. By Rhododendrites - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79387604
Verk av Saeed Jones
Associerade verk
Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (2012) — Bidragsgivare — 15 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Födelsedag
- 1985-11-26
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Födelseort
- Memphis, Tennessee, USA
- Bostadsorter
- Columbus, Ohio, USA
Lewisville, Texas, USA - Utbildning
- Rutgers University-Newark (MFA)
Western Kentucky University (BA)
Medlemmar
Recensioner
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.
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.
Listor
Priser
Du skulle kanske också gilla
Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 5
- Även av
- 7
- Medlemmar
- 810
- Popularitet
- #31,510
- Betyg
- 4.2
- Recensioner
- 22
- ISBN
- 16
- Språk
- 1
- Favoritmärkt
- 2
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.… (mer)