Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence. Influenced by everyday moments of Washington, DC living, the poems live outside of the outside and beyond the language of categorical difference, inviting anyone listening to listen a bit closer. Inheritance is about the self's struggle with definition and assumption.
About the Author :
Taylor Johnson is proud of being from Washington, DC. They've received fellowships and scholarships from CALLALOO, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Conversation Literary Festival, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference, among others. In 2017, Taylor received the Larry Neal Writers' Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their poems appear in The Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and the Paris Review, among other journals and literary magazines. Their first book, Inheritance, will be published in Fall 2020 with Alice James Books. Taylor lives in southern Louisiana where they listen.
Review :
"A rich rurality -- rabbits, pine forests, muscadines -- of life with their grandparents in Virginia is balanced with their native Washington D.C., swampy and thumping. Johnson keeps close listen to the heat and wildness inside."
--Nina MacLaughlin, New England Literary News
"The voice of these poems hooked me right away -- poised between conversational and elevated, with a kind of elegant swagger."
--Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
"Taylor Johnson, in their luminous debut collection, Inheritance, gives readers the expansive feeling of ascent. Johnson's isn't a study of the self or the past so much as a study of how one could be ... I believe Johnson is one of the more important and nuanced writers to come out of DC."
--Adrianna Smith, Washington Square Review
"Johnson seems part of a new apotheosis in modern American lyric poetry that has evolved in younger poets from the rich inflection, vernacular, sound, pitch, timbre, and syncopation of modern jazz and blues. The polyphonic nature of this new poetry is sheer pleasure."
--Walter Holland, Rain Taxi (Spring 2021)
"Often I feel weighed down by questions that get a poem from Point A to Point B. In Inheritance, ... the questions are collapsing space and sound into one plane, ... they configure into impossible structures and leave me, not in answers, but in awe."
--Sophia Durose, The Poetry Project
"This is poetry of listening and watching, of being honest about the distance that intimacy bridges. ... the honest and unsentimental benevolence of these poems is a defense of the use and value of poetry."
--Justin Evans, Southern Review of Books
"Johnson's impressive collection acts as a nexus for thinking about the ways that language, identity, and ownership collide. As a Black, trans person, Johnson's own identity exists at an intersectional space. On the page, this yields a rhetoric of "liminality," one that extends beyond language or ownership and into uncharted territory. ... The poems' oscillating tones and juxtaposed references present a complex, many-sided picture of life as it is made and inherited."
--Julianna Drew Björkstén, October Hill Magazine
"Johnson's singular debut explores detachment and communion from a Black trans perspective. ... Johnson makes the case that "I is a plural state/ of being," effectively demonstrating the rewards of complexity and multiplicity in these memorable poems."
--Publishers Weekly
"Taylor Johnson holds hands with the unknowns in their rich debut collection of poems Inheritance.. ... The poems are personal, not confessional so much as exploratory. 'Sometimes I feel so outside. Then you invite me in.' These poems do the same: they invite us in."
--Nina McLaughlin, The Boston Globe
"With simple yet powerful phrasing, Taylor Johnson has gifted readers with this compelling debut collection of poems focused on identity, self, definition and transcendence."
--Ms. Magazine
"Inheritance is [a] breathtaking full-length debut collection ... The addition of Johnson's voice to the LGBTQ+ poetry landscape feels essential."
--Baltimore Outloud
"Inheritance rings true because in its structures, subjects, and spirit it mimics the complexities of life -- each poem works to capture life's contradictions, reconciliations, and intersections; each choice Johnson makes is in service of this."
--The Harvard Crimson
"The inheritance of the ones who cannot have and are not one is passed on lyrically, in the terrible arrangements we make with pleasure against pleasure. Knowing all about this runs parallel to poetry before crossing over, going deeper, into the general song of being sung through, of being lengthened beyond what I can know. Taylor Johnson beautifully and miraculously extends that way, 'So I'm singing.' I'm singing with them, about them, because of them."
--Fred Moten
"Private sound overrides private property in Inheritance, and all that we listen for is ours. Ownership and possession--of the language, the sound, the body, the family, the spirit--are sublimated by deep listening, the demand for a tone and way of hearing that pierces the material, forces its dispersion. What is inherited, instead of territory, is a listener and will to be heard that mandates music, that loves music enough to create it through listening. The notion of inheritance shifts, becomes Black and blank and exuberant. This gorgeous debut collection lets us eavesdrop on that shift, hear into the hearing and listening of one who is in tune enough to disappear into sound rather than trying to trap and possess it as identity. The guilt and guile of privately receiving everything and nothing through hearing it, the transverse greed of renunciation of what is heard through making it music, is anyone a mystic these days?, team to liberate the heart of this work from atonal longing. This is a world in tune with its own private, overheard, magic, at the risk of losing everything that might impede it, which is what we must risk to hear and transcribe true poetry."
--Harmony Holiday
