Name: Prelude to Bruise
ISBN: 9781566893749

Saeed Jones

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

Prelude to Bruise

I’ve got more hunger than my body can hold. Bloated with want, I’m the man who waits for the moon to drown before I let the lake grab my ankles & take me into its muddy mouth.

I won’t be forgiven for what I’ve made of myself.

All I’ve ever wanted was to kiss crevices, pry them open, and flourish within dew-slick hollows. How you mistake my affection. If I ever strangled sparrows, it was only because I dreamed of better songs.

(eclipse of my third life) the recurrence of the theme of hunger 

Hunger is who we are under a black lacquered moon. Undone in his flashlit arms, is this my body anymore?

(guilt) very taylor swift right where you left me ish

Five years gone but my body is back in the truck beside you

The roof has been ripped off and the stars refuse to peel their stares from my bruises.

I’ve traded my lungs for fog machines. You won’t breathe tonight without getting high on me.

I wait hours into quarters. Trucks pass, white noise trailing radios like limbs scattered on the road and I am made of waiting.

Your grief will be useful some day, says no one.

(dirge) you are everywhere but where i need you are everywhere but where i need you are everywhere 

You are everywhere but where I need you. Nose pressed to your last pillow, even the memory of your breath, slipping. I don’t sleep so much as attempt to erase.

(postapocalyptic heartbeat) themes of hunger and waiting for someone/something again

I waited for you until I forgot to breathe, my want turning me colors only tongues of amaryllis could answer for. It owned me, that hunger, tendriled its way into my name for you.

Branches snip my clothes into feathers, each step farther into my own silhouette.

of growing up black and queer, with war blazing ahead. this broke my heart.

Praise for Saeed Jones: "Jones is the kind of writer who’s more than wanted: he’s desperately needed."—FlavorWire "I get shout-happy when I read these poems; they are the gospel; they are the good news of the sustaining power of imagination, tenderness, and outright joy."—D. A. Powell “Prelude to Bruise works its tempestuous mojo just under the skin, wreaking a sweet havoc and rearranging the pulse. These poems don't dole out mercy. Mr. Jones undoubtedly dipped his pen in fierce before crafting these stanzas that rock like backslap. Straighten your skirt, children. The doors of the church are open.”—Patricia Smith “It’s a big book, a major book. A game-changer. Dazzling, brutal, real. Not just brilliant, caustic, and impassioned but a work that brings history—in which the personal and political are inter-constitutive—to the immediate moment. Jones takes a reader deep into lived experience, into a charged world divided among unstable yet entrenched lines: racial, gendered, political, sexual, familial. Here we absorb each quiet resistance, each whoop of joy, a knowledge of violence and of desire, an unbearable ache/loss/yearning. This is not just a “new voice” but a new song, a new way of singing, a new music made of deep grief’s wildfire, of burning intelligence and of all-feeling heart, scorched and seared. In a poem, Jones says, “Boy’s body is a song only he can hear.” But now that we have this book, we can all hear it. And it’s unforgettable.”—Brenda Shaughnessy “Inside each hunger, each desire, speaks the voice of a boy that admits ‘I’ve always wanted to be dangerous.’ This is not a threat but a promise to break away from the affliction of silence, to make audible the stories that trouble the dimensions of masculinity and discomfort the polite conversations about race. With impressive grace, Saeed Jones situates the queer black body at the center, where his visibility and vulnerability nurture emotional strength and the irrepressible energy to claim those spaces that were once denied or withheld from him. Prelude to a Bruise is a daring debut.”—Rigoberto González From "Sleeping Arrangement": Take your hand out from under my pillow. And take your sheets with you. Drag them under. Make pretend ghosts. I can't have you rattling the bed springs so keep still, keep quiet. Mistake yourself for shadows. Learn the lullabies of lint. Saeed Jones works as the editor of BuzzfeedLGBT.

Rose Stanley

Extraordinary. 

Stand-outs for me were 'Jasper, 1998' (look up James Byrd Jr, get angry) and 'History, according to Boy' (that ending though).