Playhouse: Poems

Poems on Black joy, masculinity, and the music that transforms a space into a home

Jorrell Watkins’s debut poetry collection is a polyvocal, musically charged disruption of the United States’s fixation on drug and gun culture. The poems in PlayHouse embody many identities, including son, brother, fugitive, bluesman, karate practitioner, and witness. Throughout, Watkins inflects a Black/trap vernacular that defamiliarizes the urban Southern landscape. Across three sections of poetry scored by hip-hop, blues, and trap, Watkins considers how music is a dwelling and wonders which histories, memories, and people haunt each home. Past figures such as John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and the short-lived 1940s trio Day, Dawn & Dusk intermingle with Migos, the Watkins family, childhood friends, and loved ones both parted and departed. At its core, PlayHouse reckons with the truths and failures of masculinity for Black boys and men, all the while documenting moments of triumphant Black joy and love.

JORRELL WATKINS is from Richmond, Virginia. He is an alum of Hampshire College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, Fulbright Japan, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry.