Alive at the End of the World

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

Publication date: September 13, 2022 

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25

Page count: 104 pages

ISBN: 9781566896511

Saeed Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and GQ, and he has been featured on public radio programs including NPR’s Fresh Air, Pop Culture Happy Hour, It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders, and All Things Considered. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his dog, Caesar, and tweets @TheFerocity.

Winner of the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry

Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry

Finalist for the Publishing Triangle 2023 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022

An NPR Best Book of 2022

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022

An American Library Association 2023 Notable Book

A Book Riot Best Poetry Collection in 2022

An Electric Literature Favorite Poetry Collection of 2022

A Tor.com Best Book of 2022

A Them Favorite Book of 2022

“This penetrating collection shows Jones at his poetic best.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Jones’s most free-flowing work yet, a centripetal collection where rage and pain and weariness swirl and coalesce with stunning emotional and conceptual clarity, yet so intimate it feels bled from the author’s very veins.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“Jones unravels and reconfigures language like he’s untying a knot, then rethreads the strands in a delicate new construction. . . . Jones writes in the space between wreckage and resilience. He offers a calibrated reckoning with his own grief, cradled in ambiguity—and we wait, holding our breath, to see what is tendered next.”

—Erin Overbey, The New Yorker

“Personal and universal, full of grief and sadness but also packed with hope and humor, stylish and entertaining but also profound and touching.”

—Gabino Iglesias, NPR

“Jones here whips up a dizzying blend of humor, vulnerability and astute social observation to map his place in the world.”

—The New York Times

“A serious argument for community and the rebellion of joy. I love [Alive at the End of the World] for how it shows us the importance of defending our right to pleasure.”

—United States Poet Laureate Ada Limón

“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. . . . Passionate and entertaining, Jones’s book etches with fire the ‘alive’ in its title.”

—David Woo, Poetry Foundation