Slingshot

by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson

Slingshot begins with the author ensconced in the safe, soft, isolation of the rural pastoral, but once the author and the work move into urban space, monsters get bigger and wilder: sexual violence, institutionalization, mental hospitals, jails and prisons, and houselessness. In these messy, sad, horny, desperate poems full of dream logic, Cyree Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of being multiply marginalized, as black people are consistently forced to the periphery of societal care, then punished for the choices made to stay alive, while being implicated in the marginalization of others. Slingshot appropriates formalism from whiteness, then flays it and uses whatever structure is prettiest to build poems inside of its skeleton.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, Disability, Gender

80 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2019

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slingshot is the debut collection from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson and alongside themes of blackness and queerness the poems are full of vibrant language, brief encounters and emotion laid bare. My second read for National Poetry Month and I hope we see much more from this poet!

A tiny excerpt:

“a flamingo knows
even without pink lipstick
fem is a feeling”

Personal note - I was listening to the Spotify Swagger playlist when I listened to it and that just seemed super appropriate.

[Karla Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to write a review of this extraordinary collection of poetry that will do it justice but today I’m still digesting and processing each one of these evolutionary, revolutionary poems. I’ll just say that Johnson’s debut is sharp, courageous, candid, original, defiant, dirty, sexy, reflective, gender disrupting, and norm fucking. And I mean this only in the very best ways. This is one I’ll need to read multiple times.

[Bridget · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pick this up because the poems are decadent and stick with you. Keep this because the design is part of the poetry - from the size of the book (feels mighty solid in your hands) to each perfectly placed em dash - cover to cover this book is a work of art.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent and thought-provoking poetry collection about being black, queer, and disabled.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some phrases that came to me when I finished reading Slingshot is hologram kaleidoscope and magic mirror of language. I was excitedly describing some of Johnson's poems to a friend and feel like it's rare for a reader to see, sense, and smell the glitter of bodies in the space of a scene, as if the camera was able to zoom in on all six senses and then cross the threshold (and time travel) between memory and dreams. It's almost as if the glitter were the camera, the vowels and consonants the microphone, enacting a countersurveillance on white America and its liberal reimaginings. When the book chants "we hold the line as a practice of freedom" and when those lines get interrupted with "vans... horses.... cops... vans" and the "yet here they are. Fuckin up immediately." several stanzas before I felt like I was there in the crowd, sharing in this giant facepalm of white anarchist bullshit with the speaker, while knowing this particularized moment belongs to a specific people, time, and place.

This book does a lot of beautiful work with internal rhymes, consonance that wraps the tongue with word-flavour, the reworking of traditional forms. At once colloquial and so well-read that I feel like I'm relearning to appreciate the gnarly and difficult poetry that I read in my undergrad (and the hopelessly pretentious way I spoke as a result lololol). I am also just so astounded with how it engages with the complexity and fierceness of queer intimacy, in the "whoa I can't stop blinking did that really just happen" kind of way.

I have such a fondness for "an eight year old with asperger's contemplates suicide" and I'm still recovering from the poem that got me to care about Star Wars. And the reinvention of the pastoral??! GEES.

Before I accidentally reread the entire book again, let me just say: please read this book. It's so beautiful and definitely made me fall in love with poetry all over again.

[Ailey | Bisexual Bookshelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I want my armor / an exoskeleton, tough / hewn of crushed velvet / bristling with defense / a kevlar of tenderness enveloping me.”

Slingshot announces itself with appetite. These are poems that want things loudly and then want to disappear just as badly, a tension Cyrée Jarelle Johnson sustains across a collection that is messy by design and often electrifying in execution. From the first pages, Johnson’s lyricism crackles with rhythm and breath. You can hear these poems before you fully parse them, their internal rhyme and consonance carrying a spoken-word urgency that makes the body part of the reading experience.

The speaker insists on taking up space, even when that space is hostile. Urban scenes thrum with movement, surveillance, and scarcity, while moments of poverty and social discomfort sharpen the stakes of embodiment. Johnson writes powerfully about queer and gender-nonconforming hypervisibility, about being perceived too much and cared for too little.

The collection’s thematic range is wide. Johnson writes about queer elders, bad lovers, Oakland, protests, and the ache of wanting what feels unreachable. There is a sustained interrogation of manhood, shaped by refusal and reluctant envy, and a clear-eyed anger at whitewashed American mythmaking. Poems like “A Machine for Mahogany and Bronze I” and “Doppelgänger” feel especially focused, grounding political fury and personal longing in images that linger. Water and slingshots return throughout, less as symbols to decode than as textures that bind memory, violence, and motion.

That looseness, however, is also where Slingshot sometimes falters for me. The lines can sprawl, and the thematic throughlines occasionally blur, giving the collection a scattered feeling that softens its impact. I found myself wishing for tighter control, for a bit more restraint to sharpen what is already potent. Still, Johnson’s irreverence and emotional candor make the book difficult to dismiss. Slingshot is a reminder that not every book needs to be tidy to be worth the time it asks of us.

**Content Note: Please note that this book contains a use of the eugenic term “Asp*rg*rs” on page 48.

📖 Read this if you love: queer and trans poetics rooted in real life, messy and intimate books that prize feeling over polish, poetry that blends humor, anger, tenderness, and desire without asking permission.

🔑 Key Themes: Queer and Gender-Nonconforming Embodiment, Protection vs. Vulnerability, Desire and Disappointment, Protest and Collective Freedom, Queer Lineage and Elders, The Ache of the Unreachable.

Content / Trigger Warnings: Alcohol (minor), Sexual Assault (moderate), Blood (minor), Vomit (moderate), Child Abuse (moderate), Homophobia (minor), Suicide (minor), Police Brutality (minor), Slavery (minor), Sexual Content (moderate), Drug Use (minor), Ableism (minor), Suicidal Thoughts (minor), Domestic Abuse (minor).

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Lambda award winning collection is raw, sexy, unrepentant, furious, and above all personal. My impression is that the poet lacks the precision and control that would bring this collection to another level, but perhaps that loose quality is part of its irreverent and irrepressible manner. Nevertheless, I didn’t really understand the line breaks or the mix of titles or no titles, which made the poems and images bleed into one another in an ugly and not effective way.

[M.W. Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

_Slingshot_ by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson receives 4 stars from me. I think the writing is good, but I didn't get as much out of the poems, as I think I should, or would have liked. This is a fault of the reader, not the poet.

Recommended: yes. I think the poems are visually interesting, and the ones I did like I liked for the story, the characters, and imagery.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book description is perfection. BRAVE and RAW. This one was a gut-punch that I had to read in multiple sittings. Hard in places and I had to remove myself, but couldn't walk away completely. This one will stay with me.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope to hear Johnson read their work in person some day.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 J665s 2019

[Maze · Rating 5 out of 5]

omg so powerful // distinct / beautifully queer ... got shivers

[Michael Fasano-McCarron · Rating 4 out of 5]

a machine of mahogany and bronze II

[Emma Kolditz Jensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for my master thesis on desexualisation of the disabled body.

[E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and brutal and wonderful. TW for SA and unaliving.

[E.]

The poetry itself is good, but needs more TWs than I can personally figure out. Excellent writing, BRUTAL. Don't know how to rate this. This was recommended at the QLL.

[Gabriel Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read "harold mouthfucks the devil" in We Want It All: an anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, and I knew I needed to read more.

Some of my favorites include (and forgive me for butchering titles, I returned the book to the library and am too lazy st the laundromat right now to look up a proper TOC)
- the poem about being a fem and going to the philly zoo

-the mahogany and bronze saga that snaked through the collection like a binding tie

-harold mouthfucks the devil of COURSE

-the very specifically referential star wars and hamilton poems (which usually these references are an ick for me in poetry) but they were made in a sharply critical and, i guess bigger picture sort of way that made them work better?

cyrée jarelle johnson is unapologetically queer and Black and femme and it feels like everyone says that about every queer Black femme writer (even the ones that are a little apologetic) but really this collection is uniquely voiced and unable to be pushed into the amalgamation of lit. also huuuge shoutout bc cyrée jarelle is a librarian and librarians fucking stay winning!!!

[amaldae · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the long poems but found much of the collection impenetrable. Either I suck at reading or this demands a cultural understanding I do not have.