These poems bear witness to the fact that to be black and gay in America-and especially in the American South-is to be confronted with violence from every side: on the street and in the home from strangers and friends alike most painfully, from within the self. It’s often said that the personal is political few books have made me feel it as viscerally as this one.
But the book’s real ambition is to force us to see that any division between public and private is arbitrary, if not fraudulent. In Prelude to Bruise, Jones takes on at once the most intimate and the most public of themes: desire, family, race, art, America and its romance with violence. I pretended to drown, / then swallowed you whole.”
The speaker sinks under the water to see the other boy “as the lake saw you: cut in half / by the surface, taut legs kicking / the rest of you sky.” It’s a game, but also an invitation, and when he comes back up it’s accepted: “slick grin, / knowing glance you pushed me / back under. In “Pretending to Drown,” even one of the book’s most tender scenes-two boys go skinny dipping together-holds out the promise of a threat. How to tell apart joy and pain in a book where dancing is “a way / of mapping out hell with my feet,” as Jones writes in “In Nashville,” and looks like “Guernica on all fours” (“Katamine and Company”), where “Even a peacock feather comes to a point” (“Thallium”)? “Night presses the gunmetal O of its mouth / against my own,” he writes in the same poem “I can’t help how I answer.” “I’ve got more hunger than my body can hold,” Jones writes in “Last Call,” and hunger often drives the speakers of these poems to danger. It’s a powerful opening for these searing poems, in which pleasure and pain are often indistinguishable, and in which desire is almost always inextricable from violence.
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