In Year of the Unicorn Kidz, Un-Personification Takes a Front Seat and Drives
I can’t start this review without thinking about jason b. crawford’s context: A Black, queer, nonbinary human with years of experience loving and experiencing violence in America, specifically in the North and Midwest. crawford also has a background in poetry slam—a tradition known for its mastery of meter, rhyme, performance, and audience engagement. This context colors crawford’s bombastic debut full-length poetry collection, Year of the Unicorn Kidz, a diverse breath of pages that uses the language of debt and personification to enter into both contemporary and historical conversations on Black queer personhood. crawford approaches the poem as a vehicle to shape the narratives within quiet spaces—clubs, locker rooms, mouths, and more.
The book starts with addressing its subject matter head on in the multi-sectioned, formally experimental poem “Etymology of Cruising.” It starts with a grotesque scene—“a body found in the bottom of a / dumpster”—and explores the inner workings of queer sex via dating apps, moments with the speaker’s father figure, and examining Black queer personhood inside a world that rejects (and worse, brutalizes) the love you want to give justice to. “[I’m] waiting / to be crystallized in my own / mist. often, I would miss, hit / my nose, my cheek, my nipples.” Here crawford details a sexual encounter with grandiose candor, a theme and tone rampant throughout this debut collection. It is this grandiosity, however, that offers a glimpse into something more: Often, these encounters are confined to gay bars, quiet childhood bedrooms, and stolen moments in bathroom stalls—cruising—which would be erotic if there wasn’t a thick layer of tragedy coating its necessity. In this poem, crawford accurately details the experience of many queer folks on American soil: Many of us must love in the dark in order to love at all. We risk being lonely or are made to find something resembling romance in places that must be kept secret. Queerphobia in the U.S. requires it.
What is especially captivating is crawford’s use of what I call “un-personification,” the insistence on reducing the Black queer person to something inhuman, as the world tends to do to us. Year of the Unicorn Kidz is rife with glimpses of this: “There’s a man in the gym’s new steam room / made of matches and dust or the boy takes his broken bits / and boils it all down into a warm bowl of soup.” Due presumably to crawford’s upbringing as someone expected to be a “man,” this collection is preoccupied with making the Black queer person who experiences (willingly or unwillingly) boyhood into something that the world sees it as in order to invite the reader closer. Outside of gender expectations, Black queer folks are often an outlier—a marginalization within a marginalization—with their Blackness and queerness continuously called into question by folks who refuse to see us fully or at all. What is the Black queer body without either of those identifiers? “A furnace / spewing carbon? A roller- / derby of hungry mountains?”
While bringing the reader in with these un-personifications, crawford subverts them by displaying the Black queer speaker making impossible decisions—ones that the speaker must make to retain a sense of agency—through a backdrop of childhood scenarios. In “The Last Fight I Got into Was over a Dr. Pepper,” crawford details the pressure to conform to mainstream masculinity’s outward aggression, this time inside a boy’s locker room where the speaker, though not knowing it, has a kind of agency. Their options are to “return his blood to the dirt,” fight back against the bully—someone identifiable by many queer folk—or walk away, which would surely have social repercussions in our cisheteronormative world that teaches boys that they must be aggressive. In this moment, the speaker fights destruction with destruction in order to survive: “I couldn’t do anything until the first throw of a closed palm,” crawford writes. In this way, crawford is bringing the Black queer being back to humanness. It is in this poem that the speaker is fighting for their agency within a world aiming to strip agency from them.
Another way crawford brings in agency is via pure, tender romance between queer beings. Even when those romantic moments are fleeting—often, for safety reasons, they must be—crawford dwells in the softness, and how both parties are tended to via touch and their desire being fulfilled. The speaker calls the body “a collection of curves” in “On Jukin’ wit a White Boy,” then progresses farther down to guiding the white boy’s hips “like a wave in the / ocean drowning.” In this poem, two seemingly-strangers share a moment of synergy, even in the midst of conflict: Blackness and whiteness, exoticism and true desire. In these ways, crawford critiques these moments—the politics at play always—and sings these moments’ praises anyway. Isn’t that the most accurate depiction of Black queerness? Finding joy even in the midst of all things fighting it?
In what feels like a perfect calling home, the ending section to the collection, “Debt,” sees crawford section off stories from the speaker, who the reader has come to learn is Unicorn Kid, that haunt as much as they hug. Two of its 19 pages of prose poetry repeat the phrases “my skin” and “my sin”—a clear commentary on one of the central conflicts of the book. When Blackness comes with (or, for some, eclipses) queerness, what happens? This is a question large enough to take up multiple pages for crawford (and any Black and queer readers). This kind of contention between marginalized identities fuels crawford into lines like “I exchange my teeth for / happiness and then I forget how to smile with / my whole mouth.” One can gather that crawford is contending with the exchange one has to make in a white-assuming, straight-assuming world when one doesn’t live with either of those privileges. I understand the rejection one experiences from both communities as a kind of loss, so borrowing the language of finance to illuminate this experience feels both accurate and necessary in crawford’s subject matter. This poem, along with the collection at large, uses the figurative and literal language of debt to accumulate memories—a process of searching for humanity in a world that un-personifies you. The speaker in these poems takes on the role of grief-collector, searching for a world where “the boy remains mine” no matter the cost.
These poems unabashedly inform everything that needs to be known about the confines of the Unicorn Kid, the racialized and oppressed being who loves as loud as they can in the dark. This collection is one space, out of not very many that exist, that centers the Black queer experience in its grief, joy, and uniqueness equally. This book with leave you full of rage, and maybe want to redownload Grindr for the nth time just to feel. It is crawford’s soft exclamation point, one that we should all hope leads to more sentences. In today’s world, with all its doom and gloom, it is important to digest narratives that find joy in experiences history tries to relegate to some kind of deviance that should be hushed, erased, and legislated against. I, like crawford, am trying to move towards a world where Black queer joy is the default, not the exception to a gregarious American life.
jason b. crawford (@jasonbcrawford) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection, Summertime Fine, is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook, Twerkable Moments, is out from Paper Nautilus Press. Their third chapbook, Good Boi, is forthcoming from Neon Hemlock press in fall 2021. Their debut full-length, Year of the Unicorn Kidz, is out from Sundress Publications. crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and is the co-founder of The Knight’s Library Magazine. crawford is the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, the Vella Chapbook Contest, and the Variant Lit Chapbook Contest. They are the 2021 OutWrite chapbook contest winner in poetry. Their work can be found in Split Lip Magazine, Glass Poetry, Four Way Review, Voicemail Poems, FreezeRay Poetry, HAD, among others. They are a current poetry MFA candidate at The New School.
KB Brookins is a Black, queer, and trans writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. Their chapbook How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) won the Saguaro Poetry Prize and was named an ALA Stonewall Honor Book in Literature. KB’s writing is published in Poets.org, HuffPost, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. They have earned fellowships from PEN America and Lambda Literary among others. KB has two forthcoming books, Freedom House (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2023) and Pretty (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024). KB is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Fellow. Follow them online at @earthtokb.