Saeed Jones

From award-winning poet Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives—winner of the Kirkus Prize and the Stonewall Book Award—is a “moving, bracingly honest memoir” (The New York Times Book Review) written at the crossroads of sex, race, and power. One of the best books of the year as selected by The New York Times; The Washington Post; NPR; Time; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Harper’s Bazaar; Elle; BuzzFeed; Goodreads; and many more. “People don’t just happen,” writes Saeed Jones. “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.’” Haunted and haunting, How We Fight for Our Lives is a stunning coming-of-age memoir about a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes that chart a course across the American landscape, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence—into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another—and to one another—as we fight to become ourselves. An award-winning poet, Jones has developed a style that’s as beautiful as it is powerful—a voice that’s by turns a river, a blues, and a nightscape set ablaze. How We Fight for Our Lives is a one-of-a-kind memoir and a book that cements Saeed Jones as an essential writer for our time.

A Memoir

How We Fight for Our Lives

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.

Alive at the End of the World

Offers a collection of poems that explore questions of masculinity, sexuality, race, and shifting identity.

Prelude to Bruise

Shot through with 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 sings its way through the awe of living alongside everyday apocalypses. In these incisive, dynamic poems, Saeed Jones explores the public and private betrayals of living in a world poisoned by white supremacy. With wit and elegant craft, Jones strips away American artifice, revealing the intimate grief of a mourning son alongside the collective grief brought on by pandemic lockdowns, televised police murders, and the deaths of cultural icons like Cecily Tyson, Little Richard, and Toni Morrison. Drawing inspiration from Afropessimism and the legacies of Black artists and performers, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that feel unremarkably routine even as they open chasms of hurt. As Jones and his speakers 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.

A debut poetry collection set primarily in the rural South explores issues of race, sexuality, and transformation.

When the Only Light is Fire

Rickey Laurentiis

Phillip B. Williams

Darrel Alejandro Holnes

L. Lamar Wilson

Poems and conversations by men in the black, queer literary community, sparked into existence by a Best American Poetry blog from Jericho Brown in which he singled out some of the most exciting young, black, and gay men writing today ... features poems by and dialogue between poets Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson.

Saeed Jones

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