WATCHNIGHT

by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, History

104 pages, Paperback

First published February 27, 2024

Reviews

[gold cs · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book made me fall into a trance

(the poet gets 5 extra points for being from my hometown)

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Johnson shifts styles between poems, sometimes subtly. Some poems are very ethereal, others more gritty and vernacular.

Two-thirds of the pages are devoted to a novella about impoverished queer men, with many poetic flights ("We are cells to one another"). I was very moved by this strung-out (pun intended) excursion: There are family memories and recollections about the narrator's youth, political critiques, homages to friends and lovers who died too young, and more.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, the poet begins with poems that mourn

“The ones we love who’ve gone
on to glory, or horror, or nothing—all
linked, ever in memory. Names etched in bone,
on page, or slates of stone on graveyard sprawl.

Yes, grief is a sored horse that bucks and hurts,
yet we tug the reins and survive the worst.”
(Requiem, p. 1).

In “psychedelia,” the poet shifts to a prosaic voice, cobbling together stanzas into a lengthy narrative poem that reads more like flash fiction about three tangled lives devastated by homophobia, racism, and substance abuse—stories that deserve more development than the genre of poetry allows.


Favorite Poems:
“Requiem”
“Bildungsroman”
“Earth, Earth”

[Minosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got about halfway through this and I was like, wow, he has such a good hand with these formal poems. And then I got to "psychedelia" and I was literally sucked into the book and spat back out. Holy shit. Amazing.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The calendar assaults me; I am a victim of time spent without you.”

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent poetry! throughly!