WATCHNIGHT
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Nightboat Books
Published:23rd May '24
Should be back in stock very soon
WINNER OF THE JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD
WINNER OF THE KENNY FRIES DISABLED WRITER LITERARY AWARD
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, 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, WATCHNIGHT is a study of Black bonds, Black grief, and Black flight.
"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 earns its grand vigilance, its attentiveness to the tension between looking and being seen. The many speakers, rapt with insight and abandon, seem to want to be stewards of earth “who, if no one else, is beautiful” while also wanting to escape this place, fly into dances, walk among the dead, and return to tell it as music. Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, is a poet who is able to witness the self in the act of becoming, a process of refinement and expansion, that this collection allows those lucky enough to read it to join."
—Harmony Holiday
"WATCHNIGHT is a calling forth and a calling out, “a challenge to the tongue, but never the heart,” a book that weaves us back to ourselves and to the possibility of a perfect vulnerability."
"WATCHNIGHT restores some of the circulation to the occasionally bloodless wing of American poetry inspired by traditional meter and rhyme."
—David Woo, Literary Hub
"Attentive, ceremonial, spectral."
—Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
ISBN: 9781643621944
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
104 pages