WATCHNIGHT
2023 JAMES LAUGHLIN AWARD WINNER
“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.”
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.
In Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s WATCHNIGHT, the natural world also evokes the tenacity and irrepressible beauty that endures—emerges from—anticipation and adjustment in the face of constant threats. In dense blocks of text floating in the space of the page, the narrator leaps from the most personal details to esoteric, dreamlike descriptions of place.
At times Johnson’s writing, and “psychedelia” in particular, evokes Octavia Butler’s Parable series (Johnson quotes from it in an epigraph), with the narrator imagining new rules, relearning the natural world and how to live in it amidst the chaos of collapsing systems, slowly reclaiming space. For Johnson, the space of the aftermath looks much like the Georgia of many of the collection’s preceding poems, a world of family and Black traditions as alienating to the narrator as his own experiences living in the North, “betrayed / by star-spangled covenant.” Throughout WATCHNIGHT, Johnson travels between forms as much as landscapes, most strikingly the sestina. He moves freely within its braided format, obeying the spirit if not the letter. Often his language employs the elevated, evocative vocabulary of the lyric poetry tradition, but just as strikingly he deviates and grounds the poems in the concrete.
-Heather Bowlan, The Anarchist Review of Books
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.
Attentive, ceremonial, spectral.
