'Frankly, as a queer black person, my stories aren’t centered in the literary canon, so I’m always thinking about how a piece can be of use.'
, Saeed Jones describes a visit in his early teens to the local library in his hometown of Lewisville, Texas. “All the books I found about being gay were about AIDS,” he writes.“Gay men dying of AIDS like it was a logical sequence of events, a mathematical formula, or a life cycle. Caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly; gay boy, gay man, AIDS. It was certain.
“This is not a walk-in-the-park kind of book,” he acknowledges, emphasizing that the difficult subject matter made the brevity of the sections all the more necessary. “I wanted the reader to feel that every scene mattered. Frankly, as a queer black person, my stories aren’t centered in the literary canon, so I’m always thinking about how a piece can be of use. I want my work to be of use.”
Jones, who recently moved to Columbus, Ohio, has been back in New York for a few days to record his own audiobook. Unlike many writers, he has no trouble reading into a microphone, which probably has as much to do with the inherent musicality of his sentences as with his background as a poet . Or maybe it comes from the confidence of someone who had to fight very hard to feel secure on the planet.
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