Overview

In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson's unnamed protagonist on a psychedelic quest across myriad forms, places, and times marked by climate crisis, exodus, and Black trans identity-making. In exhilarating lyric poems and chiseled prose blocks, Cyre Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnight-a churchy holiday of messianic tarrying-and steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacement-from countryside to city and back again. Spanning from 1803 to a near-future rife with class tension and racial anxiety, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.

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9781643621944

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Reviews

"""Some a few pages long, and some untitled, the poems present themselves as homemade weapons (like slingshots) against malign parents, authority figures, structural racism and fears of the other. It’s challenging work, in its language, its stories, its subcultural references ('prince died for fem bois'), yet it offers pellucid queer intimacies."" ―Stephanie Burt, The New York Times ""Nothing short of magnificent, Johnson jailbreaks language to speak ambitious, rigorous lyrics of Black/trans/disabled/ sex working story. At times I screamed out loud at the wondrousness of the work. SLINGSHOT is the next generation of Black disabled genius poetics, and I’m in awe and grateful."" ―Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha"

"""In this book Cyrée Jarelle Johnson demonstrates deep foresight and long memory often in the same phrase.  What a ceremony for our times, our wounds, our longings."" —Alexis Pauline Gumbs ""The impressive sophomore collection from Johnson (after the Lambda Award–winning Slingshot) wrestles with history, identity, and belonging in poems that showcase the poet’s formal dexterity and invention. . . Urgent and wise, these poems look back to envision a precarious future."" —Publishers Weekly ""Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s second collection WATCHNIGHT is a major accomplishment of form and imagination. The poems in this book traverse the space between the confessional, the historical, the mythopoetic, and the speculative, guiding readers through all the rich particulars that make up the material of a life. Here is a poet firmly rooted in, but never tied down by, tradition. A poet in dialogue with those who have come before, but who brings to the conversation what is all too rare these days: something poignant and new to say.” —James Laughlin Award Judges Leila Chatti, John Murillo, and Sam Sax ""WATCHNIGHT restores some of the circulation to the occasionally bloodless wing of American poetry inspired by traditional meter and rhyme."" —David Woo, Literary Hub ""Some a few pages long, and some untitled, the poems present themselves as homemade weapons (like slingshots) against malign parents, authority figures, structural racism and fears of the other. It’s challenging work, in its language, its stories, its subcultural references ('prince died for fem bois'), yet it offers pellucid queer intimacies."" ―Stephanie Burt, The New York Times  ""Nothing short of magnificent, Johnson jailbreaks language to speak ambitious, rigorous lyrics of Black/trans/disabled/ sex working story. At times I screamed out loud at the wondrousness of the work. SLINGSHOT is the next generation of Black disabled genius poetics, and I’m in awe and grateful."" ―Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha"

Some a few pages long, and some untitled, the poems present themselves as homemade weapons (like slingshots) against malign parents, authority figures, structural racism and fears of the other. It's challenging work, in its language, its stories, its subcultural references ('prince died for fem bois'), yet it offers pellucid queer intimacies. Stephanie Burt, The New York Times Nothing short of magnificent, Johnson jailbreaks language to speak ambitious, rigorous lyrics of Black/trans/disabled/ sex working story. At times I screamed out loud at the wondrousness of the work. SLINGSHOT is the next generation of Black disabled genius poetics, and I'm in awe and grateful. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Some a few pages long, and some untitled, the poems present themselves as homemade weapons (like slingshots) against malign parents, authority figures, structural racism and fears of the other. It's challenging work, in its language, its stories, its subcultural references ('prince died for fem bois'), yet it offers pellucid queer intimacies. Stephanie Burt, The New York Times Nothing short of magnificent, Johnson jailbreaks language to speak ambitious, rigorous lyrics of Black/trans/disabled/ sex working story. At times I screamed out loud at the wondrousness of the work. SLINGSHOT is the next generation of Black disabled genius poetics, and I'm in awe and grateful. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Author Information

Cyre Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, NJ. He is the author of SLINGSHOT (Nightboat Books, 2019), winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Johnson was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and served as the inaugural Poet-In-Residence at the Brooklyn Public Library. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Apogee, Foglifter, WUSSY, and Atmos among other publications. WATCHNIGHT, his forthcoming book of poetry, considers ancestry as history in the context of the Great Black Migration of the 20th century, familial estrangement, and queer family.

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