Jason B. Crawford, Year of the Unicorn Kidz

Some debts can only be paid with the body. And in jason b crawford’s rebellious and desirous debut, a life is the cost of an errant belonging. Crawford shows that to exist outside of the paradigms of a racist and homophobic society, one becomes even more indebted to it. Blood is the price, token money, a down payment. The poems in this collection are full of everything a queer Black boi should and should not say, should and should not do—‘i went where the boys found me irresistible and i made it out alive’—now what must be paid for that? Throughout this collection is the paranoia that the piper/the collector/the reaper will show at any minute. Yet, despite the foreboding, there is a precarious life that continues as it must. (“Forward,” Jonah Mixon-Webster)

American poet Jason B Crawford’s full-length poetry debut, following chapbooks through Variant Lit and Paper Nautilus Press, is Year of the Unicorn Kidz (Knoxville TN: Sundress Publications, 2022), a book that works through trauma, cruising, sex and what one keeps from one’s father. “What is the act of playing with dolls,” Crawford writes, to open the poem “Boys and Dresses,” “other than putting the boy in a dress? // What is the act of homophobia / other than ripping the doll from the boy’s fingers? // What is this act other than calling your own kin / a faggot, removing him from every family photo?” In certain ways, Crawford mines a similar terrain as does Toronto poet Jake Byrne, guest editor of the recent “Daddy” issue of CV2: queer identity and sex, experiences with homophobia and marked or broken connections including family, personal and intimate. “The way to a man’s heart,” Crawford writes, as part of the poem “Anatomy of the Jaw / Lessons on giving head,” “is through his gutting/how much / of him you digest in a single sitting / It is through the slick slit / and how it hungers / to be filled/with him / it is never a question of when is dinner / rather where/and what limit / is he allowed to consume [.]” Composed through forms including the English-language ghazal, the pantoum and the sonnet, there is something interesting in the way Crawford utilizes formal constraint and poetic form, quite possibly, as a certain kind of stability through which to explore and articulate deeply personal, intimate and occasionally messy content. In this way, one might also think of Diane Seuss, and the one hundred and twenty-eight sonnets that make up her frank: sonnets (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. As part of the poem “A Pantoum of Yellow Fields,” Crawford writes:

I am piss drunk off love for you
or the 5 shots of whiskey that smoke like
midsummer and stain the chest like drenched leaves
We roll around the dry grass, dogs shattering in heat

or the shots barreled into the moon still smoking
He asks if he could kiss me on the rough edge of my thigh
Rolls around me like a field of shattered glass
and this time I am not too drunk to tell him yes