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Paperback, 100 pgs.
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Inheritance by Taylor Johnson, who is Takoma Park, Maryland’s Poet Laureate, is deceptively quiet. It opens with a poem, “Since I Quit That Internet Service,” that speaks to community and finding your voice. It is such a hopeful beginning to a collection that delves into the depths of our nation’s capitalism, what role gender-ization plays in society and how it forces us to view ourselves as something we seem to have no control over, and the pressures of race, a societal box to check, and all its baggage.
All of these poems ask us to carefully consider the word “inheritance” whether that be what we’ve carried from our families, our DNA, what we’ve been given by relatives after they pass, and so on. Johnson, for example, widens his definition of “inheritance” to include the spaces between us and strangers and the slight nods of acknowledgement we give and receive in passing. Johnson’s poems are witnesses and participants at the same time — we all can relate to that if we take the time to pause and listen, watch, and consider the complex world and our participation in it.
Chiaroscuro (pg. 42) Whereas I come into the into to talk with my shadow. From you I've not hid my face. For in the morning I make, and am made by you: beautiful projection, boy in the mirror, boy in my mind. I separate my flesh from my flesh to become more like you, to drown in your holdings. O young lord of my desire, you are the light I ride toward, I run from. I eat less and avoid being hailed. Anonymous interstitial prince of my undoing, redeemer of my yes, I want to grow into you, and then abandon your imprecise naming. I am bequeathed violence— your inheritance — and your rough glamour. I am made to tarry, here, with you, thus illumined by your tenuous light.
Inheritance by Taylor Johnson is a collection to read aloud and read again as you listen to each word, envision each image, and hear the truth of life and its complexity. We try so hard to simplify a world that is far more layered than our brains can comprehend, perhaps we should just live it, not try to wrangle it into submission.
RATING: Cinquain
photo by S*an D. Henry-Smith
About the Poet:
Taylor Johnson is from Washington, D.C. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. He is the Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland. With his wife, Elizabeth Bryant, Taylor curates the Green Way Reading Series at People’s Book in Takoma Park.
DC Poets for DC Schools edited by Robert Bettman, purchased from DayEight.
