Reading & Conversation: Jason B. Crawford and Abi Pollokoff

We are ecstatic to host jason b. crawford and Abi Pollokoff in-store to celebrate their respective new poetry collections, YEET! (crawford) and night myths • • before the body (Pollokoff)!

Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom.

Following the traditions of Eve L. Ewing, Rio Cortez, and Douglas Kearney, jason b. crawford’s YEET! envisions the Black community lifted off the earth and set free towards the stars. These poems ask what a free Black people would look like and how we might achieve such a thing. This collection presents a new take on Afrofuturism and utopianism. Rather than looking to a future of technological change, it steps years ahead to show how people are happier once they are no longer owned. These poems speak to racism, gun violence, colonization, global warming, flight, joy, friendship, and noise. This is a book about creating new worlds without the systems of supremacy that held down the old one. YEET! is the winner of the 2023 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest, chosen by Sawako Nakasayu.

JASON B. CRAWFORD (He/They) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025. They have been published in POETRY Magazine, Academy of American Poets, Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO Poetry, among others. The are a 2023 Emerging Writers Fellow for Lambda Literary and hold their MFA in Poetry from The New School.

An ecofeminist interrogation of identity, vulnerability, and relationship that dismantles the boundaries between the body and the natural world to reclaim expressions of power and womanhood.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR night myths • • before the body

“Abi Pollokoff’s night myths • • before the body is a stunning debut, navigating womanhood, mythology, the body, and the surreal knowledge that dwells within. These poems linger with sensorial intimacy, stretching ‘spandex language,’ with wildly inventive language and sonic curiosity: ‘the skin all breezehumbled with ghosts & kin.’ Pollokoff’s writing is a generous awakening, with poems encased in oozing amber, revealing multitudes of selfhood to be discovered: ‘i woke up this morning with seagulls encased inside me.’” —Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

“In Abi Pollokoff’s debut collection, night myths • • before the body, we experience a storm of language. But what a carefully calibrated storm it is: one where lineation and the cadence of semantically driven breath create an atmospheric meaning that holds the reader with the same trembling electricity as pre-lightning static. On the page we not only see but also feel and hear the new topography rendered by this weather—like the echo of water’s shape stamped on the land after a storm—and receive a text that is freshly embodied, fully realized, and, as Pollokoff writes, ‘all verbed out.’ In this propulsive work, the tension between sound and syntax sings like rain on dry earth. As Pollokoff writes, ‘watch the body.’ I can’t take my eyes away.” —Keetje Kuipers, author of Lonely Women Make Good Lovers

“As Abi Pollokoff’s percussive rhythms morph and flow, the mind and body are drawn ever deeper into a grove of night music. In this mythic space the recurring motifs of fragmentation, metamorphosis, and liminality articulate a feminist critique of fixed identities. Offered in their stead are between-spaces and an invitation to transform like the book’s narrator from human to plant, from solid to liquid. This powerful debut volume sings the body and the communities it makes possible with the human and nonhuman alike. Let us listen. Let us participate in this riveting communion.” —Karla Kelsey, author of Transcendental Factory • • “This collection promises to stay with its readers […] finding new ways to live out the embodied music her generation asks of feminist environmental poetics.” —C. R. Grimmer, author of The Lyme Letters

ABI POLLOKOFF is a poet, editor, and book artist. Her work has appeared in publications such as TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, and Guernica, and in such installations as the Summit Sound, the Seattle Convention Center sound installation. Abi was named a 2021 Jack Straw Writer and a 2019 Hugo Fellow. She has held residencies from the Seventh Wave, the Seattle Review of Books, and the Alice Gallery. In 2012, Abi won the Anselle M. Larson/Academy of American Poets Prize for Tulane University, judged by Caryl Pagel. She was a finalist for the 2022 Coniston Prize, judged by Dorianne Laux, and the 2022 Gatewood Prize, judged by Julie Carr, and a semifinalist for the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her poem “aubade” was a finalist for the 2019 Omnidawn Broadside Contest, judged by Dan Beachy-Quick. In addition to her own writing, Abi is the managing editor of Poetry Northwest Editions and works in publishing. Abi received her MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, by way of Seattle, New Orleans, and the Chicagoland area. Find her at abipollokoff.com.

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