Map/Ship/Promise: A Review of jason b. crawford's Second Collection, “YEET!"
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Map/Ship/Promise:
A Review of jason b. crawford's Second Collection, YEET!
By DeeSoul Carson
Admittedly, we are living in times that make it hard to imagine better ones to come. Admittedly, I have spent the last six years thinking about the next six years, and the six after that, and how often we are asked to wait for a brighter day, a joy in the morning, a lesser of innumerable horrors.
What crawford offers us in YEET! is an alternative history, a guidepost pointing to a planet where Black people are safe without question, where the only thing we must hide from is whatever sun drunkens us. Reading the collection, I was reminded of Danez Smith’s poem “dear white america” from Don’ Call Us Dead (2017) particularly its ending lines:
“i’ve left Earth to find a place where my kin can be safe, where black people ain’t but people the same color as the good, wet earth, until that means something, until then i bid you well, i bid you war, i bid you our lives to gamble with no more. i’ve left Earth & i am touching everything you beg your telescopes to show you. i’m giving the stars their right names.”
Indeed, this parallel is not an accident, with the prologue poem of YEET!, “When we finally get there 一” written as a direct response to Danez’s goodbye letter to the violence of the world we currently inhabit, the world we’ve inhabited since the protests and police brutality that informed the poem, the world we’ve inhabited since men decided land could be discovered and claimed and colonized, since were able to strike up any thought on how we differed from one another.
crawford’s opening poem, which you can imagine written on the ship ferrying Black people to a better planet, a spacefaring Black Star Line, opens with a question:
“—should we start by crafting a map?”
This is the question as we take the journey through the collection’s three acts: Departure, Arrival, and Home. There is a question of who deserves to know the way to safety, or rather, how Black safety is jeopardized when the particulars of our refuge are shared. There is a resistance from the speaker to claim any new land or discoveries as their own, understanding the violence of ownership and any kind of relationality that separates the one from the we.
The book’s first section, Departure, opens with “essay on YEET!,” one of a series of nine poems that share the same name appearing throughout the collection. The poems dwell on the collection’s eponymous word, yeet, a slang term of various meanings ranging from an expression of surprise to the forceful throwing or launching of an object across space, as we might imagine our starsailing Black folks searching for a planet that will sustain them. The poems vary in form, playing with space and repetition and rhythm that invite the reader to slow down and take stock of each individual word. For example, the poem’s opening section utilizes bullet points (•) as a kind of caesura, invoking pause and deliberate interruption in the text’s reading:
“ i • saw • the •
bullet • take
• aim • take • flight • take • towards •
the • flesh • crave • the • body •
sweet • scalpel • the • insides • of
muscle • weave • the • deltoid • •
through • the • pectoralis • pattern
perform • dance • twirl • among •
bones • polish • around • the blood •”
The essays themselves are positioned in different ways, this one offered as “an archival after Douglas Kearney,” the others with descriptions such as “a conjuring after Dior J Stephens” and “a road map after Simone White.” They are interrogations into the ways we understand our environment, our threats, the people we love and hold on to, the spaces we find ourselves hurtling through until acted upon by some force, some bullet or God or lover’s hand or homie’s laugh. Departure makes clear that the world these Black folk leave is a tired one, too full of violence and war to be sustainable for any kind of desirable life. Saying goodbye to what we know is painful, but never worth the cost of what we must endure if we stay.
Arrival, on the other hand, finds the speaker making sense of the journey itself. In “if i cannot find our safety anywhere in this galaxy, then i will become Nowhere,” the speaker becomes the place they are looking for, they way we become the safety we find in each other. The poem ends with:
“if i do not make it, can i become a place where the rest of my people survive?”
My husband has a quote he repeats often: “We have to plant the seeds of trees we may not live to sit in the shade of.” To love your community is to sacrifice for it, to put in labor you may never benefit from. The speaker understands this, understands that the journey they’re on may not be one where they make it to the promised land. I read this collection and think of my grandparents and Jim Crow, my great-great-grandparents and a history of horror they survived so that I may sit at my desk and wax about poetry, so that one day the only violence we know is what we’ve heard about in old wives’ tales about the terrible star we sailed from.
A poem I particularly enjoy in this section of the book is “History of the Ark: a pop quiz,” a poem presented, as titled, in the form of a multiple-choice quiz. I am a sucker for hermit crab poems, or poems that make use of other recognizable writing forms/structures to scaffold the text’s experience. This poem is just one of many in the collection that exemplifies crawford’s experiment with form and architecture, imagining new worlds for use in how we build language as much as they imagine a new world in which we will reside.
The collection’s final act, Home, is two lengthy poems that find our travellers arriving in their new land. The book’s closing poem, one of the “essay on YEET!” series, is a dance of lyric and beauty that sees us as anything but dead. It refrains from divulging the location of this new land, but it promises us that is exactly what we hoped for:
“...i must
admit, this isn’t a map for you
to find us, rather to know we made it
safe, there’s so much green
in the palms of our planet that it is starting to hue
the sky, if i take a deep enough breath, my lungs will bloom wild
orchids, their stems hugging my arteries,
it has become so difficult to say beautiful and not mean alive.”
YEET! imagines Black people somewhere alive and safe, imagining a new language for the way we breathe. The poems of this collection are formally daring and expansive, asking us to consider the architecture of our experience, the systems and powers that mediate our existence. In this collection, we are dancing, and the flowers bloom with our living. The only thing we must worry about is what to do with all of this beauty.
About DeeSoul Carson
DeeSoul Carson is a poet, educator, and host of the O,Word? podcast. A Stanford alum, his work is featured or forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, AGNI, & elsewhere. For his work, DeeSoul has received a National Endowment for the Arts and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the NYU MFA program, the Watering Hole, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. His debut full-length, The Laughing Barrel, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in Spring 2027. Find more of his work at deesoulpoetry.com
About jason b. crawford
jason b. crawford (He/They) born in Washington, DC and raised in Lansing, Michigan, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and was published Fall 2025. At the time of this recording, it was also a finalist for the 2026 Lammy Awards from Lambda Literary. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and RHINO Poetry, among others. They are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.
