jason b. crawford’s YEET! is a charged constellation of longing, language, and liberation—a text that sprawls, resists, and reclaims in every direction. Through unapologetically Black and queer poetics, crawford challenges the limits of the page, inviting readers into a future where joy isn’t an exception but a practice of survival. What they offer is more than a collection—it’s a blueprint for what it means to write without apology, to speak in the full cadence of your ancestors, your humor, your grief, your desire.
In a literary world that often asks BIPOC poets to perform their pain for consumption, crawford refuses flattening. Instead, YEET! demands that we witness the complexity of Black life in all its messiness and radiance. Crawford’s work offers a sanctuary for other BIPOC poets—a reminder that our poems can be expansive, experimental, disruptive, and deeply rooted in cultural memory. Their fearless engagement with form, language, and lineage becomes a beacon, signaling to emerging writers of color that the page is not a cage, but a canvas.
In this conversation, we spoke about the visual architecture of poetry, Black joy as protest, and the power of reclaiming language from the margins. Crawford’s vision is both grounded and cosmic: they honor the poets who came before while making space for the ones still finding their voice. For anyone writing from the edges, YEET! is not just a book—it’s a call to action. A reminder that our stories belong here, unbound and unapologetically loud.
Darius Phelps: YEET! feels like an explosive, multi-directional force—linguistically rich, rhythmically agile, and politically charged. There’s a choreographic brilliance in how the poems move across the page. Can you speak to your relationship with the visual field of the poems? How do decisions around lineation, white space, and breath function as political gestures in your work?
jason crawford: Thank you—that’s so generous. When I started writing this book in grad school, I was thinking deeply about space—both physical and metaphorical. The first poem I wrote, “when we finally get there,” is formatted to move upward, to feel like it’s leaving the page. I wanted it to vanish, almost, like a visual metaphor for departure.
Later, in a class on spatial poetics with J. Mae Barizo, I really started thinking: how can Blackness—represented here as Black ink—take up more space on the page? I wanted a sprawl. I wanted overflow. I wanted the poems to feel busy, alive, and unapologetically expansive. For me, that’s a political act. We’re often asked to make ourselves small—YEET! is a refusal. A refusal to be quiet. A refusal to be boxed in.
DP: That leads beautifully into this next question. How do you understand hybridity in your work—not just as aesthetic experimentation, but as an Afrocentric, spirit-led practice of resistance and reclamation? What poets or traditions shaped your desire to bend, remix, and reimagine poetic form?
jc: Oh wow, I’ve been chasing this since undergrad. The first book that really cracked me open was Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton. It showed me that I could write poems that were loud, messy, nerdy—me. Kearney made it clear that Blackness doesn’t need to be constrained by anyone’s definition of what a “literary” poem looks like.
From there, I started seeing myself in the work of Danez Smith, Evie Shockley, and definitely Arielle Marie—who’s doing incredible things with language and form. And of course Olio by Tyehimba Jess. What I love about these poets is that they make the page a site of freedom, not just trauma. Too often, when Black poets break form, it’s read as an expression of pain. But what if breaking form is also an act of celebration? Of play? Of possibility?
DP: Exactly. There’s a deep emotional architecture in YEET!—anger, grief, joy, longing—all held with equal weight. And yet, you never sentimentalize pain. How do you write from trauma without being defined by it? What boundaries or liberations did you discover in the process?
jc: That’s such a good question. Honestly, I’m someone who can find joy even when I’m down bad. And I didn’t want to write another book that felt like I was weaponizing my sadness. I needed YEET! to feel like me—fully me. Not just a poet responding to state violence, but a human being capable of joy, desire, longing, silliness.
I think we’re finally seeing more space for joyful Black poetics—books like Homie by Danez Smith are leading that charge. But joy is hard to write. We’re taught to turn pain into product. But what does it mean to craft poems from happiness, from imagination, from safety? That became my boundary: I wouldn’t write only from the wound. I would write toward healing.
DP: How do you engage research, memory, or ancestral listening in crafting this work? And how do you understand the role of the poet as historian or cultural archivist?
jc: The poet has always been the archivist. We don’t just record what happened—we capture how it felt. That’s what makes poetry essential. When we think about the Vietnam War, we might not remember the dates, but we remember the poems that told us how people survived it.
In YEET!, I tried to tap into that tradition. The “essays on yeet” throughout the book are like a kind of call-and-response. I’d read a poem—by Douglas Kearney, Xan Philllips, Eve Ewing—and then write a poem in conversation with that energy. It’s a kind of lineage-building. A way to bridge the past, the future, and the imagined.
DP: The title alone—YEET!—is a declaration. A kinetic refusal. A celebratory act. In reclaiming a word often dismissed as slang, you elevate it into a poetic philosophy. How did you arrive at the title, and how do you imagine this collection contributing to the canon of Black, queer poetics in the 21st century?
jc: Honestly? It started as a joke. I used to say “yeet” all the time, and when I didn’t have a title for my thesis, I just slapped that on it. But my friend Matthew Mastricova read the manuscript and said, “Wait—this actually fits.”
When you think about the original vine where the word comes from—a girl tossing a can and yelling “YEET!”—you realize the brilliance of it. The can disappears. It flies into the unknown. And that’s what the book is doing, too: launching Black language, Black joy, Black futurity into space without explanation. It’s reclamation. It’s resistance. It’s ours.
DP: Final question: Would you consider YEET! the start of your rebirth as a poet?jc: Absolutely. Year of the Unicorn Kids taught me how to put a book together, but YEET! taught me how to trust myself. Every poem is where it’s supposed to be. Every gesture on the page is intentional. I wasn’t just learning how to write poems—I was learning how to write myself back into the page. And that feels like a beginning.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of the forthcoming My God’s Been Silent.
jason b. crawford (They/He) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. 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. They are a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. They are the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, the winner of the Rhino’s Founders Prize, and a finalist for the Frontier’s Open prize. crawford was a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid 2021 and 2022 Poetry Contest. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Metro Weekly, AGNI Magazine, Foglifter Magazine, Four Way Review, Cincinnati Review, Frontier Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. They hold an MFA in poetry from The New School. Their second collection YEET! was the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published in Fall 2025.