All right, we are down to our last three cities for the live in the stacks tour, and if the first two stops were any indication, you do not want to miss this tour.

I will be in Washington, D.C. with Jason Reynolds on September 24th. I will be in New York City with KSA layman on September 25th, and I will be in Los Angeles on October 18th with three guests.

Yes, three guests, three of my favorite friends of the podcast, Rachel Lindsay, Chelsea Devantes, and Sam Sanders.

The show promises a night of big laughs, hot takes, and more bookish conversation than you could possibly imagine.

Tickets are selling fast, so head to the stackspodcast.com slash tour right now before they sell out.

Welcome to the stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host Tracy Thomas, and for this episode, we are joined by author and poet Sy Jones to discuss his new poetry collection, Alive at the end of the world.

Can I just say, this collection is insanely good. I cannot trust that enough. You all know, poetry isn't really my thing, but this book, oh my gosh, it's the real deal.

It's about grief, anger, chaos, memory, and all the things we're dealing with right now in America. Jones is also the author of the 2015 collection, Prelude to Bruce, and one of my favorite memoirs from 2019, how we fight for our lives, which won the

circus prize for nonfiction. Listen, if you take nothing else away from this episode, Sy Jones can write. Remember, next week, Wednesday, September 28th, we will be discussing the stacks book club pick the trees by personal

Everett with Lisa Lucas. If you're looking for any of the things we talked about on today's episode, be sure to click the link in the show notes to find everything we discuss.

If you love the show and want more of it, head to patreon.com slash the stacks and join the stacks pack. You'll get bonus episodes of our show, like our most recent one with good friend of the pod, cream isles, plus our virtual book club meetups, our bookish discord, and more.

If those perks sound exciting to you, or you just really want to show your love for this little black woman run indie book podcast, head to patreon.com slash the stacks.

Thank you to our newest members, Lola, Michele Bonyas, and Jane Hunter. Thank you all so much, and thank you to everyone in the stacks pack. They're truly would be no podcast without you all. Now, it's time for my conversation with Sy Jones.

All right, everybody, to say that I'm excited today would be like the understatement of the year. Many of you know I wrote a list of guests that I wanted to have before I ever recorded an episode of the podcast, and today I have one of those bucket list guests.

It is author and poet Sy Jones, say you'd welcome to the stacks. Hi Tracy, we did it. We did it. We're here. I want, so when your memoir came out in 2019, I had sort of just started the show, but I got an arc, and I was like, I'm going to get him on the show, and your team was like, sorry, you're not fancy enough. So now I'm finally fancy enough for you.

I'm here. I'm here. You know, I was just, I was just a comment making my way across the stars to you, just a little bit longer. We just needed a little more time to marry now. We have even more things to talk about. So that's true, that's true. Before we get into like some random stuff, we have to talk about your new poetry collection alive at the end of the world. So in about 30 seconds or so. Can you tell folks what it's about. Sure. In some ways, I think of this new book as a kind of a sequel to my memoir, how we fight for our lives.

You know, at this point in my life, I'm 10 years into the experience of grieving my mother who died in May of 2011. And so then, you know, 10 years finds us at this moment in the present and the midst of a devastating pandemic. And I think it's fair to say, you know, that kind of phrasing of, I feel like it's the end of the world. I feel like what's going on is everything. You know, I just want it to drill into that sentiment and to see what I could uncover.

And I think for me, alive at the end of the world is kind of me connecting personal grief with a sense of collective and maybe even historical grief.

You know, and in this sense that honestly, it's a state of being, you know, the sense of the apocalypse. It's a vibe.

Yes, it is. It is the only vibe these days. So we both share that we lost parents. My father died in 2012. And one of the things that we've been talking about on the show recently is grief. We had an author on who wrote a book about grief. And we've been talking a lot about like the acute grief that you feel like personal private grief. And then there's like the communal grief and the societal grief. And we talked about grieving America and what it means to be black in America and like how that affects how we grieve and all of that. And then I read your collection.

And I was like, wow, this is like the exact book that I needed in this moment. I'm wondering how, you know, 10 years after the death of your mother, how you're thinking about grief differently than maybe you were five years ago or or three years ago when your other book came out or like how these things have shifted for you.

Sure. I mean, the first two words that come to mind are humility and gratitude. One, because, you know, the last few years, what people are having to endure and getting your present tense in terms of the loss and the circumstances, feeling abandoned, you know, by our government, by each other at times, you know, people who are dealing with, you know, being immunocompromised, long COVID, you know, all of these things like a lot of people feel like, oh, I'm just on my own.

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