Year of the Unicorn Kidz, Jason B. Crawford

Jason B. Crawford’s Year of the Unicorn Kidz beautifully explores existence on the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. Their profound navigation of identity, violence, and desire transcends boundaries and binaries. Vulnerability takes the centre stage as the speaker of these descriptive and passionate poems unburies old relationships and haunting memories. Year of the Unicorn Kidz reads like a coming-of-age story for marginalized youth in America, sketching the body in terms of disconnection, loss, and the explosive nature of desire. From burning rage to healing friendships to the thrill of forbidden encounters and the regrets that follow them, Crawford revisits the reckless elements of youth that capture the inner and outer conflicts of self-discovery. They bring incredible depth to their poetry with urgent and vivid storytelling that delicately reveals the complexity of reality, while also leaving room for readers to reflect on their own.

“In Year of the Unicorn Kidz, ode and elegy coexist by necessity. Crawford crafts for us a poetic landscape sat at the intersection of violence and desire, drenched in neon and horror movie fog. Even in this book’s happiest poems, risk is always in the periphery, whether they are writing about beloved friends, cruising, or childhood memories. Undergirding the entire collection is Crawford’s particular talent for writing through violence with stunning tenderness, rendering knives and teeth blunt even as they speak them sharp into a poem.”
—Torrin A. Greathouse, author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound and boy/girl/ghost

“In Jason B. Crawford’s searing and magnificently rendered first collection, Year of the Unicorn Kidz, we get to bear witness to the prowess of a brilliant and unflinching poet. The poems in this book dance in the space between desire and violence, between nostalgia and the living body, between touch and touch. Urgent and formally dexterous, this book makes a nightclub of memory, queers the lyric, and guides the reader by the hand through all the impossible bedrooms, bars, and churches of the mind.”
—Sam Sax, author of bury it, and madness

“In this moving delivery, Crawford takes readers through the tender, arresting movements of Black queer self-discovery. With careful attention, the poet reminds us that the many awakenings of adolescence make us who we are. From childhood sleepovers and neighborhood fights, to college parties and cruising sites, these poems grapple with the intricacies of desire and the conditions of inheritance. With this, we come to understand the ways in which Black boys learn to love and live into variances of intimacy. There is beauty, but also violence. Year of the Unicorn Kidz harnesses a hard truth that continually deepens. We are asked to carry it, and in the process, we have no choice but to question our own.”
—Malcolm Tariq, author of Heed the Hollow and Extended Play