WATCHNIGHT

Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is a poet from Piscataway, NJ. He is the author of SLINGSHOT (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 in Poetry, Apogee, Foglifter, WUSSY, and Atmos among 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–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."—Major Jackson"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