WATCHNIGHT

In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnsons 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, Cyre Jarelle Johnson charts the history of his family alongside the history of Watchnighta churchy holiday of messianic tarryingand steps through portals to render the human faces of American internal migration and mass displacementfrom 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.