Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones (review)

Depending on where you look, every day someone is listening and learning, someone is tearing down lives, and someone is reminding us we need to listen harder. Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise gives us a poetic chronicle to which we must listen, and then listen harder. It reveals to us how an assaulting world works on the interior, sandblasting, battering, and mangling the soul. It teaches us, if we are willing to listen, that survivors of hatred and abuse do so by an individual (almost divine) will, fanned by even the smallest signs of love and affirmation. This collection walks us through the life of a lover whose love is attacked from all sides, especially by those we expect would love us best: parents and lovers. We must listen, learn, and become better lovers of one another.

The prefatory poem, “Anthracite,” and the first section establish a perspective that shifts between first and third person. The first line prepares us for this, “A voice mistook for stone,” implying that a history of mis-taking—the speaker mistaking himself, parents and lovers mistaking him, classmates and foes mistaking him, us mistaking him—lies ahead (xi). Boy warns, “Beware / of how they want you; // in this town everything born black / also burns” (xii). Central to Boy’s being, blackness and sexual identity, and how the world often treats them, are intertwined in these poems. Throughout the first section, we witness father’s hatred for Boy’s sexuality, as in “Boy in a Whalebone Corset,” “Father in my room / looking for more sissy clothes / to burn … His son’s a whore this last night / of Sodom” (12).

We learn, by poems horrifying and entrancing, Boy’s body and mind. Through the daring syntax of “The Blue Dress,” Jones delivers us a seamless, single sentence, a series of equalities:

Her blue dress is a silk train is a riveris water seeps into the cobblestone streets of my sleep, is still rainingis monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles …is me floating in her dress through the streetsis only the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a bluedressout to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea.

(3)

The incantation of this poem, its lyric ebbing, unifies us with Boy when bathed in the blue dress—we know the wholeness and apprehension Boy feels, and this effect is true for most of Prelude to Bruise. With “Pretending to Drown,” we experience the intimacy Boy shares—sexual and existential—with a lover during a flirtatious night swim:

I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.

(6)

And this poem echoes the book’s epigraph from Franz Kafka, “The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms” (ix). Jones, again and again, reminds us that in this life ecstasy and drowning come grown together. Sometimes pain is ecstatic, sometimes ecstasy is painful, and sometimes we drown in ecstasy or forget what it’s like to have joy. Boy continues to relay his ecstasy and drowning through the entrancing “Boy in a Stolen Evening Gown,” suggestive of a sonnet:

In this field of thistle, I am the improbableLady… I waltz in an acre of bad wigs…See how I switch my hips

for you, dry grass cracking under my pretendhigh heels? Call me and I’m at your side,one wildflower behind my ear… I could be the boywearing nothing, a negligee of gnats.

(7)

Boy knows the ecstasy of wearing the perfect gown and of losing it. And Jones has rendered these poems as electric dreams—smooth syntax, imagistic precision, and an effect of wholeness that lasts. With “Last Call” Jones introduces a haunting metaphor that echoes throughout the book:

Night presses the gunmetal O of its mouthagainst my own; I can’t help how I answer.

(16)

Boy’s mouth meets the night’s “gunmetal O,” and later, “He made me / lick the taste of bullet // from the...