Note: This transcription is edited to facilitate the reading experience. For the best viewing, please read on a desktop or horizontal on your phone :) | Read my review of YEET! in Honey Literary
DeeSoul Carson: It’s been comforting to me to see, because I really want my second, “serious collection” to be called HUH?!?! Like, that’s-- I really, in my heart, that’s what I want it to be called.
jason b crawford: I love it. I love it.
DeeSoul Carson: I need people to understand that I do mean the things in the book, even though I have this kind of joking title. It fits, I promise. But it really was me going, like, I would love for my bio to be, like, “DeeSoul Carson, author of HUH?!?!“
jason b crawford: Wait, does it have question mark, question mark?
DeeSoul Carson: It’s question mark, exclamation, question mark, exclamation.
jason b crawford: Oh, absolutely. The more you add on, the Blacker it gets.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah.
jason b crawford: Amazing.
DeeSoul Carson: Helloooo, poets of the internet! I’m DeeSoul Carson, and this is e·pon·y·mous, an O, Word? podcast series interested in poets, the title poems of their collections, and how their work finds its way into our hands. Today’s episode is on YEET! by 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.
jason, hello!
jason b. crawford: Hello, DeeSoul.
DeeSoul Carson: It’s so nice to have you on here.
jason b crawford: It’s so nice to be here. It’s so nice to be seen virtually and in your ears. Thanks for having me.
Defining “YEET”
DeeSoul Carson: I’ve been super excited about this collection. I was super excited reading it. I used it in one of my classes recently, talking about, I think for your book specifically, we were thinking about the line and also the construction of the book. So, I guess to start with the title, which is this popular slang term that means a couple of different things depending on the context. So, you know, it can mean throwing something super hard. It has been an exclamation of surprise or joy or many other things depending on, you know, where you’ve encountered ‘yeet.’ What does “yeet” mean to you in the context of this collection?
jason b crawford: I think — and I’ve been mulling this idea over. Even when I shopped this question or, or shopped this title and asked if it was the correct title, I’ve been asking myself, what does “Yeet” mean? And for me, truly, I think it means a survival. And I think because I’m talking about so much Black language, or the excavation/preservation of Black language within the book, along with this Afrofuturistic fairy tale of leaving Earth and finding safe space, we have to keep some language to ourselves.
For those that don’t know what yeet comes from, or at least the first time I ever heard it, it was in the 2014 Vine where the girl literally throws a can and says, “This bitch empty - yeet!“
And like I… that was like… it was a joke at first. I was like, “I’m gonna call the book YEET!‘” And I just-- I would say it, “This bitch empty — YEET!“ Right? Like, ‘cause, you know, the book is empty. I ain’t have nothing, right? And then it made sense. ‘Cause “yeet” itself has been taken and misrepresented and repurposed by white culture and by white tongue, and this is a reclaiming of that as well.
DeeSoul Carson: When you were shopping the book around, as poets do with collections, were you afraid that, because of the title, it wouldn’t be taken seriously?
jason b crawford: Absolutely. I was like-- I mean, to know me is to know I should not be taken seriously half the time, right? I mean, when I got the Lammy nomination, I literally posted me twerking to the Lammy nomination, right? But also, yeah, I think there is a little fear that we’re already talking about Black language and Black survival and then Black joy, which are often things that are not packaged well together and want to be sold.
And I was like, “Damn, I’m gonna do that and use, like, a ‘joke’ title?” What does that look like? What does that mean? But my publishers loved it. They said, “Fuck no, keep that. Keep that.”
DeeSoul Carson: I’m glad. This is very similar to the conversation, I feel like I was having with [Dr.] Taylor [Byas], about her book, Resting Bitch Face. ‘Cause she said a very similar thing, she was worried about — when she was talking to her publisher — if this was the right title, and the publisher was like, “Yeah. Yeah, this is the title. Keep that.” It’s always really nice to hear when editors are affirming of that, of your vision of the book, whether or not we’re afraid it’ll be taken seriously or not.
Freedom & Discovery in YEET!
The description of the book describes it as “Afrofuturist poetry that envisions Black people finding new worlds of freedom,” and you’ve also spoken on this a little bit already, but how do you feel that you go about exploring ideas of freedom in this book? What questions or discoveries revealed themselves to you in the process of that exploration? How long were you working on this collection?
jason b crawford: Well, let’s start with that part. This was my thesis, so I started it in 2020-- fall of 2021, and it was done spring of 2023 when I submitted this.
DeeSoul Carson: Wow.
jason b crawford: So two years. A tight two years. And actually, everything but I think maybe two poems in the entire collection [were] written in [those] two years. I know for a fact “This Is Not America” was not written in that timeframe because it came out a little bit before… I wrote that after [NAME | TIME | Cop Kill a Black person], right? I wrote that right before I moved to New York, and then I submitted it, it got published, whatever, who cares?
Then I know that the first of the series, which is the “When I Finally Leave New York” series, was written the day I was moving into my apartment here because I was so tired of moving things. I was like, “I’m gonna burn all this shit.” And then it became a poem thinking about moving and leaving.
So those two were outside of that. Everything else was during. With that being said, I did not know when I started my MFA that I wanted to write a book about exploration of new land. I didn’t know I wanted to find a space for Black people to be free. I just know, again, I’m sure something happened at some point at some time during my first semester, and I was writing these poems.
The first poem that I wrote, my first ever poem for grad school was the first poem in the book, “When We Finally Get There ————” and I realized as I started, every week I’d write a poem to turn in, and every week I was like, “Oh, this poem is talking about Black people finding safety, finding freedom,” and it’s so different than my first book.
My first book is all about queer safety and how there are no safe spaces for queer people. In this one, I said, “No, I’m gonna find it for the Black people.” I think that’s how I was thinking, the entire time I was writing was, “I have to find this place. I have to find this place. It has to happen.”
DeeSoul Carson: “When We Finally Get There ————” is one of my favorite poems in the book, so it’s very helpful that it’s also the first poem. I think it’s a really great… when I was talking about your book in the class, something that we were talking about is sequencing. How does a poet go about deciding how the book leads us through the journey of its project or whatever.
Your book was a little bit more, I think, easier for them to grasp ‘cause it had a distinction between in the story, like the narrative of the book, of Black people leaving, finding a safe place to land, right? So there being two sections, “Arrival” and “Departure.” But we were really interested in the visual effect that first poem was having, “When We Finally Get There ————” and that literal fading out of the text as we went through these three sections of it.
It was very clear from the jump this book is asking us not just [to] imagine new worlds for ourselves in, for Black people, but also [to] imagine new ways of getting to those kinds of worlds, right? So new ways of looking at the poetry, looking at what text on the page can do. There’s a similar effect that happens throughout the poems that I think I probably will touch on later with either fading out effects or stacking and things like that.
So there’s these visual-textual clues that we have for this idea of repetition, or even exhaustion, that the book touches on.
The “essay on YEET!” Series
DeeSoul Carson: So the title, YEET!, manifests in the collection via a series of poems that are all titled “essay on YEET!” that reoccur across the book. How do you feel approaching that term from so many different angles, and how did that re-engagement help to transform the word for you, if at all?
jason b crawford: The idea of the essay in itself was me looking to talk to other authors. The book was also positioned in my mind saying, “What if we all left shore, but now let’s push it 500 years in the future?” So now we’re actually talking about history lessons. That’s how we got “History of the Ark” and history of, the other history.
DeeSoul Carson: “History of Leaving.”
jason b crawford: Yeah. Right. That’s how we got those, and then the essay is technically supposed to be as if students were writing essays in classes. That poem itself is a student’s work, writing essays for someone. And I think it allowed for me-- like, YEET is this manifested planet or whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be the planet. Like I’m not saying it is.
DeeSoul Carson: I like to imagine it as the name of the ship.
jason b crawford: Oh, yeah.
DeeSoul Carson: The — we’re on the YEET.
jason b crawford: Yeah, we’re on the SS YEET. “YEET to control center.” So it’s like us trying to engage with this history and write about it, and how do we write about it other than in an essay form?
DeeSoul Carson: There’s this interesting parallel to me, and it may or may not be intentional, but as I’m thinking about the SS YEET, I’m thinking about the Black Star Line. So Marcus Garvey, trying to facilitate trade, trying to get Black people back to Africa, which in itself is sparked by the idea that Black people are not safe here on the American continent for many, probably obvious, reasons, and so trying to find a safe place for Black people in that regard. I also just saw a movie called BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions; it was a movie, but it presents itself as an album, and it’s like, “think outside of kind of narrative constraints and engage with the media as an album or a poetic text.” Something that’s a little bit less worried about a narrative experience and more worried about a somatic experience. And so, just thinking about these recurring ideas of Black people wanting to find safety somewhere, and then what that looks like and what does it mean to like move a whole group of us.
There’s also, of course, Danez Smith’s poem, “dear white america,” which has a similar conceit, right? And so this is another thing that comes up over and over for us.
jason b crawford: Can I just say that, speaking of Danez, I believe that one of the things I truly was aiming towards is “summer, somewhere,” which is a huge, 20-something page poem, [and] it has shaped a lot of my writing career. I think subconsciously, I was thinking when I started this process between reading Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches — “Arrival Day” is the first poem in her book — and so reading that poem and then thinking about “summer, somewhere,” those two cross-pollinate into the book.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. I can feel that when I’m reading through the text, and it feels... they’re all in conversation, which I think this book is really trying to engage with, especially as we’re thinking about essays, right? Those are their own kind of conversations, but this book feels very in conversation with a lot of Black poetics and a lot of Black thought in general about, how do we find safety, and what does that look like?
AFTER POEMS IN YEET!
DeeSoul Carson: All the “essay on YEET!” poems are ‘after’ poems, which, for listeners who are not aware, are poems that take inspiration from a direct source. Some of these afters in this book in particular are given different kinds of names, right? So we have, for example, ‘The Invisible City’ after Italo Calvino or “A Conjuring” after Dior J. Stephens. What did it mean for you to be in conversation with these different sources in the collection’s title pieces? And can you also speak on the different ways that you went about framing them? ‘Cause I was really interested in that aspect specifically.
jason b crawford: Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe that my words aren’t really my words. It is whatever comes to me when it comes to me. I will always tell people this every single time: I am not as smart as my poems. My poems know more than me, and it’s just true. It’s-- I’m writing what the poem wants written. I would read a poem or read a book, really, and then I would have an idea of what a poem should be for YEET! and I would write that poem. And then I would have to reckon with the fact that I wrote this poem after reading Xan Phillips, right?
There’s no other way to say it. I read Xan, I mean, I wrote the poem, right? I read Douglas Kearney, which is one of my favorite poets of all time, and then I wrote the poem. And if you look at the Douglas Kearney one, it looks like a Douglas Kearney-ass poem.
It’s funny ‘cause the Calvino one is the only one not accredited to a Black poet. The only one. And that’s because I wrote that one specifically in a class where we read The Invisible Cities and we had to write something towards it, and I wrote a poem. But outside of that, all the other ones, I was like- I’m reading Black poets for the reason of this book, so I need to make sure I’m attributing them in there.
The framing — a lot of them are different because I believe they’re asking for a different thing. Like ‘the conjuring with Dior,’ it was truly a spiritual conjuring of a new world with no bullets, with no guns. Whereas the other ones, like ‘the roadmap’ is clearly a destination point. ‘The archival’ is us trying to talk about the past. The one after Hanif has nothing, right? So it’s literally a noticing. That’s kind of how we got to all these different ones. [I wanted to] frame it in a way that made sense to what I’m asking the poem to do.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, it definitely was helpful for me as a reader to have the different cues as to what you — or what the speaker, since poets never like to place themselves as the writer of the book.
Sidenote, I always think that’s really funny, like we just can’t say that it’s us? That diagram is a circle, okay? The speaker is you.
jason b crawford: The Venn diagram is a dot. What do you mean?
DeeSoul Carson: But yeah, I appreciated it because it made it very clear to me how I should be managing my engagement with the poem. It’s not even necessarily that anything would’ve been lost, but I think people sometimes forget what can be done with paratextual clues, right? So when we put things in the afters, the subtitles of the poems or when we put things in the notes of a book, we’re allowed to engage with the outside of the poem on the page. I think sometimes we feel a little bit sacred about that.
Like, the poem is the poem, and it’s like, yes, the poem’s a poem. But the poem is also the things that informed the poem, right? And so I appreciate this, the poems in this collection pointing at the things that they were born of because it helps us to lead back into that conversation. It makes such a much more rich poetic landscape when we can say things did not happen in a vacuum.
The Collection’s Physical Appearance
DeeSoul Carson: For those who have not read the collection yet, they may not know that this book is landscape. I think that surprised me the first time you showed me the book in person. It’s a small but surprising physical aspect of the collection, that you have to hold it a different way than you would most books that you’re reading. Part of me was just wondering why did you choose to have the book set this way, and did it hold any specific significance towards the project’s aim?
jason b crawford: Absolutely. As I tell my students all the time, there is nothing in a poem that does not matter. You cannot leave anything to chance. The space on the page, the way it’s set, the spaces in between, all of that needs to be doing something, holding its weight, right?
When I was writing the book, I wrote the entire book in landscape. It started just because of that first poem, because there was no other way to write it. It had to be landscape. Then, what I realized when I did that was, I took up so much space on the page, and I was like, “Oh, look at this Black text taking up white space.”
I just really wanted the encroachment of Black text taking up white space as much as possible. And I realized it’s easier to — and this may sound weird when I say this, ‘cause technically you could do it either way — but it looks more menacing, and it’s easier to do when you have it on landscape, ‘cause it feels like it’s actually moving across the page. Whereas the other way, it just feels like a regular written poem.
It allowed for large shapes. Technically the “essay on YEET!,” the Calvino one, creates an island. That’s supposed to be islands, and I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that. Actually, I know for a fact ‘cause I tried to do it the other way, that I couldn’t do it in that frame. Secondly, when I did this, the actual framing of the book, by turning it sideways, I’m already asking you to do something that is so radical.
Not turning the book sideways. That is, unfortunately, a radical thought process to at least half of America, if not more, right? If you’re willing to do the hard work of taking a book and flipping it sideways and reading it like a calendar, then you’re probably willing to do the work to believe that Black people should exist. You’ve already done a hard thing.
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, taking those small leaps in order to get us towards those bigger leaps in, unfortunately, imagination, for now. But hopefully that imagination will lead us somewhere, right? We have to imagine a better world before we can build it.
In my class I talked about your book during the week we were talking about the line. I think sometimes we can get afraid of what the long line can do or ask of us, like the amount of space that it requires, especially once you flip it in landscape, right? There’s even more of a line to work with. So what it asks of us, for reading and also for writing, like to get to the end of that line and then make something that fills up the page, is quite the endeavor.
Repetition in the Collection
DeeSoul Carson: On a final note, the last thing that I’ll ask is: Something that strikes me that I’ve mentioned before about this collection is repetition, not just the title of poems but also images like flowers and natural life [are] really big in this collection, or the repetition of language within particular poems. What is your own personal relationship to repetition? Even more generally, how did you go about engaging with form throughout the writing of YEET!
jason b crawford: One of the biggest things I learned in undergrad when I was doing the creative writing program at that program I will not shout out... No shade. But I was taught anaphora. I remember this very specifically because my professor called it “an-uh-four-a,” and I was like, “Oh, it’s Ana Phora. It gotta be Ana Phora.”
DeeSoul Carson: That is a drag name.
jason b crawford: It is, right? And that’s why it was just there.
DeeSoul Carson: Someone write that down.
jason b crawford: The idea that you can repeat something and it will change its wording or meaning. I often think of the repetition-- Now I think of the repetition that’s in “There’s Always This Year,” from Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay collection, like how he re- or continually comes back to the word ‘witness,’ and how witness changes its shape and meaning depending on how it’s placed into a specific anything, or a specific phrasing.
The reason I returned to this repetition was multiple different reasons, right? The stacking of language made it look more chaotic when I was talking about the Douglas Kearney poem. Whereas in “Ode to Bear Milk,” which…love the party, awful name, I will continually say that. But the ‘ands’ are actually just adding bodies to the actual crowd, right? So like now it feels like a club full of maybe 400, 500, 700 people. It’s not. That club can’t fit that. But you don’t know that because that’s what it feels like when you’re there, and it never feels endless. Which is kind of why that repetition happened in that way.
The flowers are all the Black people. Every time I name a flower, I’m actually talking about Black people, right? Like that is a choice, and if this is a Black collection, I need to keep bringing up these different types of flowers because there’s different types of Black people. You know, we’re not all one uniform Black, right?
What I think of repetition is that if used correctly, it can alter, change, and enhance any single poem because it can be used in so many various ways. I think when you’re talking about the hesitancy of stepping towards that, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t wanna say the same thing over and over again.” Sometimes you have to. Have you ever danced?
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah. And some things bear repeating.
jason b crawford: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So yeah, that’s how we got there. Um, I was like, “I’m gonna just keep saying these words over and we’re gonna see if it works.” And my MFA cohort was like, “It work,” and I said, “Work.”
DeeSoul Carson: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the biggest things as poets we maybe sometimes learn as we go towards a project is; you have to lean into things if you wanna be seen. Like, if you really wanna push yourself, you have to lean into it, not out of it, ‘cause that’s how you get the work that really excites you. For me reading the book, the repetition just helped create that through line that I think it was aiming for. I love what you’re saying about the flowers being different kinds of Black people, ‘cause not only is it all different kinds of Black people, but also all alive, right? When I think of flowers, I’m thinking of something that’s alive and breathing and beautiful to look at wherever you are. And so I appreciated those being brought throughout the collection.
I appreciate you. I appreciate your time on this podcast and everything you’ve said about the collection. I hope everyone goes out to read it. But to close this out, I would love it if you could read one of your eponymous poems for us.
jason b crawford: Of course I can. I’m going to read the final poem in the collection, and if I may, I-- it’s hard to talk about this poem or read this poem without just saying a small piece, which is the Simone White piece. I got to see her perform some of her poems at the Guggenheim, and this actual scene at the end is something that basically really happened. If you see me out on the street, don’t talk to me, I’m not that nice. But if we’re at an [event], you can ask me.
essay on YEET!
a roadmap after Simone White
if you are wondering where we are, here the grass grows thistled and thorned, unconcerned by what could cause it harm, stupidly blooming everywhere it can touch, which is everywhere next to the mouth of a mothering creek, and yes the creeks here bloom, too, wild daisy-chain of water lilying its way around the greening bark of old oaks which are still blooming into a perfect orange and i must mention the apples here are so bright that even the crisp air takes sips from them, the tangerines bloom their sharpest during what you once knew as winter but we know as nothing ever dies, we never run out of space, the land itself cracks a smile wide enough for us to build on its teeth and yes here too we dance and the dance is an act of blooming, and there is no tomorrow or yesterday, only right now and uncles licked in the mystique of a charcoal grill and i must have mentioned the trees before, their vines tangled and thriving, their trunks wet with breathing, the small triangles of flush light peering through their leaves, it covers us in silk as we dance, yes, this blooming is survival, a dance we continue even after our music drifts into the windbreaker whistle of the leaves and we dance to our own silence, the jive-break-pop of our bodies collecting sweat in awe of each other's movements, all as one we dance circles around each other, a rotating hand of a bracket clock freezing us in a swirled step, where we can sound out the drop of the knees as they buckle from the soft age lent to us by the sand, the dust clacking beneath our soles, our dreads a gust of tambourines boomboomcacking to the silence we are holding, the blade in our fingers excavating the joy in the lack of noise, look how loud we have become in all of this space, we are soaked in felicity, our mouths clayed into silent laughter, we dance like Black blood cells suturing wounds, spiraling silence, listen, hear the joints crack out of place, the small steps of praise pressing joy into the dirt, a praise so holy ghost that we perform to this trap beat, a praise so grotesque that we still come out unbloodied, our snarls and yips piercing the night, a praise of blooming bodies hollering into the dark, a praise only the dead could create, could you imagine a place loving us for being alive, 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.
From YEET! by jason b. crawford. Copyright © 2025 by jason b. crawford.
The poem appears with the permission of Omnidawn Publishing. All rights reserved.
DeeSoul Carson: Thank you all for listening to this episode of e·pon·y·mous, a series of the O, Word? Podcast produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. Music for e·pon·y·mous and O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify. O, Word? will be going on a summer break to rest and prepare for new episodes to drop in the fall. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, and thanks for listening.
