Saeed Jones Quotes

If you look at the poems in Prelude, you can identify the later material by identifying the poems with more white space and unexpected line breaks. Grief did that to me and my writing. It exploded my expectations and introduced these blank pockets of deep feeling. My prose writing became more fluid and lyrical…

I’m obsessed with manhood as a brutal and artful performance. My mind always finds its way back to the crossroad where sex, race, and power collide. Journeys, transformation, as well as dashed attempts to transform, fascinate me as well.

Being gay isn't a choice, just like being black isn't a choice…I don't stop. I do not give up. I do not take America's 'no' to my identity for an answer.

Something you see in the book is my tendency to self-bully. It started when I was a gay black kid growing up in the suburbs. I wasn’t bullied by individuals; kids weren’t shoving me into lockers or calling me slurs to my face. Shame—electrified by racism and homophobia—was enforced by the broader culture though, and in response, I started bullying myself. I started saying cruel things about myself to myself. While I’ve generally grown out of self-hate, an ease with being tough and candid about myself to myself is an integral aspect of my writing…

They die bright, fantastic deaths every chance they get.

These hands can’t find the walls,

Leaning against that wall, dispassionately sipping a beer, he was the kind of quiet I've noticed in certain men and long hungered for: the silence of men who have it all and thus find it all boring, who don't exert the energy necessary to flirt, persuade, or convince because they know America will come crawling to them on hands and knees.

"I don't watch the video
but I can feel it playing

on a loop in a room miles
away from where he keeps

dying behind my eyes. All
I have left are tiny twitches,

small choices. "Please," I beg
alone in the box of my dark,

"I don't want to hurt that way
today. I already hurt that way

yesterday. Please don't kill him
again.

People don’t just happen. 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.

It's just too easy for a gay black man to drown amid the names of dead black gay men.

Everyone has a lie we're quietly waiting to believe.

He seemed to thrive on creating a sense of order, on understanding the tasks to be taken care of.

I felt swept along, swept past. It annoyed me, how easily she was able to pry me away from myself. When I put down the phone, though, my frustration curdled into shame. How could I begrudge the woman who raised me on her own? How dare I, when she had found it in herself to keep loving her own mother through decades of ups and downs?

When I looked up, she was staring at me, wide-eyed, almost pleadingly — as if I'd led someone afraid of heights to the edge of a rusting bridge. And then I did exactly what people who love each other do: I changed the subject; I changed myself; I erased everything I had just said; I erased myself so I could be her son again.

My mother's body wouldn't recover so much as bide its time against her heart's inevitable betrayal.