Saeed Jones is the author of How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir, the collection Prelude to Bruise, and the chapbook When the Only Light is Fire. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and GQ, and he has been featured on public radio, including NPR’s Fresh Air, Pop Culture Happy Hour, It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders, and All Things Considered. In the haunted poems in Alive at the End of the World (Coffee House Press), Jones strips away American artifice 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. He sees himself as an unreliable narrator, so he looks outward to understand what’s within. He calls on cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin, and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. The end of the world is already here, and the apocalypse is a state of being.