SLINGSHOT

A beautifully complex poetry collection, Johnson is defiantly sharp and humorous, with lines clearly from a technician. Themes include Black lives and organizing, disability, queerness, sex work, and societal devastation and care to name a few. If you want a book that flips formalism and confounds, Slingshot is a stunning addition to your self-isolation reading life.

In SLINGSHOT, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson challenges readers with sharp, unapologetic poems of intimacy, gender roles, and disability. The title is spot-on as Johnson hits you like brick and awakens you to the revolution that could finally bring the phoenix from the burning embers of a society on the brink.

There are a lot of reasons to read Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s new book of poetry. Many readers will pick it up because of its contributions to crucial contemporary conversations ranging from blackness, transness, sex work, police violence, protest and neurodiversity to the new Star Wars movies. Slingshot is also worth getting, however, for its strange, precise, sumptuous and formal poetic technique.

With some poems anchored in the mess of real-time violence and protest, and others floating in a realm where earthliness is exchanged in favor of moral questioning, Johnson’s command of language imbues all of his poems with unforgettable staying power.

Rather than hold the reader’s hand and explain the complexities of the world they’re drawn from, these poems present themselves on their own terms and trust the reader to keep up. It is in this aspect that the poems point back to the title, in a way, each one a stone shot out to strike at the consciousness who hears it.

The book is an incredibly tight, powerful work. The first time I read it, I had to take a walk around the block in the rain. When I say this book does something new, I do not mean that Cyrée Jarelle Johnson is one of those new voices or poets to watch. What I mean is that even if you’ve read thousands of books of poetry, you will be compelled to reread this one. It is unlike whatever you’re reading. This is a debut collection, but this is not an immature work.

These are completely unapologetic poems shot-thru with fierce evidence of a life being negotiated in relation to the self, to the state, and to the john with self-actualized determination, taking life on their own terms, constantly asking what would you do if you were pushed? There is intimacy and lyric but no room for fragility here, no long romantic, pastoral musings and no, you may not cling to outmoded formalisms without facing a mirror, full frontal. As the title suggests, these poems are projectiles, and the shape of them, handmade.