Those chants are not the only thing Jones and his mother share. What subsequently follows is no simple bildungsroman, but short, lyric chapters of growing up that move–dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish–back and forward and back and forward, circling in on themselves like the Buddhist chants we witness Jones and his mother performing throughout the book. “Just as some cultures have a hundred words for ‘snow,’” Jones writes early in How We Fight for Our Lives, “there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night.” The generative failure of language–here instantly recognizable and yet gorgeously specific–brings us Jones the Poet transforming into Jones the Lyric Memoirist of Youth. (After all, his debut poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.) But if we’d forgotten, we’re immediately reminded of the attention Jones brings to every word of every sentence of every paragraph from the beginning of his debut memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. Given his recent BuzzFeed celebrity–he was co-host of AM to DM for BuzzFeed News, as well as a former executive culture editor for the tech behemoth–we might forget Saeed Jones is, first and foremost, a poet. ‘How We Fight for Our Lives’ by Saeed Jones
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