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An image of the book cover "PlayHouse: poems." The top half are two young black boys standing in front of a brick house. The bottom half is in Black with the title and author name in white text.

Northwestern University Press, Curbstone Books (April 2024)

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 Play|House 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, Play|House reckons with the truths and failures of masculinity for Black boys and men, all the while documenting moments of triumphant Black joy and love.