WATCHNIGHT

In WATCHNIGHT, we accompany Johnson’s 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, 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 ...