WATCHNIGHT [Paperback]

WINNER OF THE JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD
WINNER OF THE KENNY FRIES DISABLED WRITER LITERARY AWARD

InWATCHNIGHT, 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, Cyrée 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,WATCHNIGHTis a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.USCyrée Jarelle Johnsonis a poet from Piscataway, NJ. He is the author ofSLINGSHOT(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 inPoetry,Apogee,Foglifter,WUSSY, andAtmosamong 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.

"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–winningSLINGSHOT) wrestles with history, identity, and belonging in poems that showcase the poet’s formal dexterity and invention. . . Urgent and wise, these poems look back tolÓÀ