‘Alive at the End of the World’ Review: A Raw and Poignant Homage to Apocalypses Big and Small

“Alive at the End of the World” is just that: alive. The latest poetry collection from award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet Saeed Jones delivers on its titular promise of a living, breathing read in the face of grief, loss, and apocalypse. Jones uses this collection to explore the depths of his personal grief as well as the societal despair inflicted by white supremacy in the United States, not only as an outlet for his sorrow but as a voice for social change. Grim humor shakes up what would otherwise be a somber narrative, favoring a trend not towards fatalism, but rather a hope for a better future.

This collection features a cohesive blend of free verse poetry, prose, and narrative elements that speak both to his personal history and the history of Black oppression. When he asks himself, “Did I Just Trick Myself into Writing Another Memoir?,” the answer, unequivocally, is yes. Jones pries open the deepest recesses of his heart to give the reader a raw look at what and “who happened to him,” as he writes in “If You Had an Off Button, I’d Name You ‘Off,’” from his inexorable grief over the loss of his mother to his search for meaning in encounters with men to his early experiences with prejudice in a Texas classroom — and that’s exactly what makes this collection so wonderfully human.

At the same time, Jones provides an intertextual account of the effects of white supremacy, speaking from the perspective of and drawing from the lives of figures such as Luther Vandross, Little Richard, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Maya Angelou, Billie Holiday, and more. Through these voices Jones finds a greater power to educate and vocalize a call for action; he is driven by history, and this momentum is felt in every word on every page.

The principal spark in this collection comes from a somewhat unconventional structure. From the very first page, Jones’s work oozes with poetic form; poetic devices such as meaningful repetition underscore even the table of contents, where duplicate titles “Okay, One More Story” create intrigue and emphasis before the poetic narrative even begins to unfold. Here, the cyclical nature of the work is revealed, as the reader is given a preview of the repeating pattern of “Alive at the End of the World,” “Grief,” and “Saeed, or The Other One” that begins and ends each section of the collection — a soothing yet foreboding rhythm that, like the narrative itself, does a fantastic job of evoking the cocktail of hope and dread that Jones breathes into his work.

He even hides poetry in the quote attributions found interspersed in the pages, indicating one quote in particular to be from “Saeed Jones, repeating a line from ‘1989’ by Alexander Chee.” Every nook, from cover to cover, is thus bursting with creative excellence; irregularity, in this case, compliments the apocalyptic subject matter.

Part of the vivacity of this collection sprouts from the uniquely transparent process that Jones employs. In “Saeed Wonders If the Poem You Just Read Would’ve Been Better Served by a Different Title,” the reader is provided an insight to the inner working of Jones’s poetic process. Similarly, at the end of the book, he provides a section entitled “Notes at the End of the World,” containing his inspirations and explanations for many of the poems. Some of these are presented in a cryptic manner, such as his note that “The Dead Dozens should be read while playing a game of Spades that ends in drunken laughter and an act of unspeakable violence,” adding another layer of poetic mystique, a poem in and of itself.

These descriptions can prove quite helpful in deciphering many of the more abstract poems in the collection, such as “The Essential American Worker,” for which Jones notes that “the white space in the poem is ghost text as opposed to blank space,” a necessary detail to fully comprehend the work as it’s presented. This seems to be the collection’s only downfall: It errs on the side of abundance, and at times explains itself too much.

Poetry is, like most art, subjective and interpreted differently from reader to reader. In Jones’s rigorous explanations of his poems and prose, a key aspect of the consumer experience is lost — readers are deprived of an ability to postulate for themselves. At times it feels like checking an answer key: What is the reader supposed to extract from this? What is the right way to consume this art? On the other hand, these explanations advance the author’s purpose: Without an explanation, the historical gravity of many of these poems might fall flat, and thus the excess of detail may be a necessary evil in this particular work.

“Alive at the End of the World” is as raw as it is masterful. Engrossing and beautifully brief, it can easily be consumed — and arguably is best consumed — in a single sitting, following Saeed Jones through his despair, hope, desperation, and connections from beginning to end. Emboldened by his sort of “open-source” construction of the collection, Jones reminds the world that its end takes many familiar forms; it can be mundane or cataclysmic, and it’s right around the corner.