The first book of Saeed Jones's poetry, Prelude to Bruise, reads with astonishing momentum and tenacity, a lyrical torch thrust into shadows and silence to illuminate pain from a history of wounds. "And his darkness/ mistakes me/ for sunrise," he writes in "He Thinks He Can Leave Me." Jones writes often about Boy, whose body reveals truths--about himself and about the outside world--that are dangerous in their acute honesty. He wears dresses, so many dresses, and is met with violence and desire, sometimes as one and the same. In the devastating "Body & Kentucky Bourbon," Jones is loath "to realize you drank/ so you could face me the morning after." Here and again Jones pulls taut the recurring tension of "boy" and "body," a mere letter to distinguish them. Later, in "History, According to Boy," this defining letter--D--stands in for the first willing object of Boy's desire.
Orbiting, interrupting, intersecting and converging upon these intimate moments are wars and news stories: a drowning New Orleans, a burning Paris. A throbbing dance floor welcomes his trysts in "Ketamine & Company" and leads into the staccato blows of "Thralldom II": "Good hurt, hurts good, his lap, smack./ Fishnets, lips pursed, knife wound--red. First pose, third pose, head thrown/ back." Queerness, blackness, violence, resilience, longing and sex roil over every exquisite syllable. Prelude to Bruise proclaims "if you ever find me,/ I won't be there" with the same electrical charge as Audre Lorde announcing, "I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." Saeed Jones's kinetic, shining prelude is one hell of a beginning. -- Dave Wheeler, publishing assistant, Shelf Awareness