Year of the Unicorn Kidz
2022 - Creative Writing at The New School
Sundress Press, March, 2022
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 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