Slingshot

Slingshot begins with the author ensconced in the safe, soft, isolation of the rural pastoral, but once the author and the work move into urban space, monsters get bigger and wilder: sexual violence, institutionalization, mental hospitals, jails and prisons, and houselessness. In these messy, sad, horny, desperate poems full of dream logic, Cyree Jarelle Johnson considers the consequences of being multiply marginalized, as black people are consistently forced to the periphery of societal care, then punished for the choices made to stay alive, while being implicated in the marginalization of others. Slingshot appropriates formalism from whiteness, then flays it and uses whatever structure is prettiest to build poems inside of its skeleton.