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by Taylor Johnson (Author)
"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
"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)
Author Biography
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.
