Saeed Jones published a book of poems, Prelude To Bruise. Over at Buzzfeed, he’ll tell you why he wrote them, too:

“My mother had a fatal heart attack the night before Mother’s Day in 2011. The experience of losing her broke me down. I quit my job teaching high school English and pretty much locked myself in my apartment for a while, writing poems and crying hysterically. One morning, I woke up with tear streaks dried on my face. I think I’d been crying in my sleep which my mother herself used to do.”

Jones also talks about loss, ethnicity, and the incongruities of having “a black man literally fall from the sky and land in the middle of a cotton field”.