Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books), winner of the 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 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor was the inaugural 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.
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Inheritance: PoemsFrom"Conjecture on the nature of inconvenience"
If there is a ground, then there are bodies beneath it.
If the bodies know my name, then I am said to be protected.
If I am spoken for, then I could've died a number of times.
If I am still here, then I am speaking for the dirt.
If there is dirt, then there is my mouth wet and ripe with questions.
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Inheritance: PoemsFrom"The black proletarianization of the bourgeois form isn’t Kanye West’s gospel samples"
O, Death. Your singular eye. My mother speaks the King’s English. Makes quiche. Makes clove pomanders in winter. Pawned her flute. Cleaned my elementary school classroom. What is hers? Brillant song, my mother, sotto voce, in her chair asking for touch. It is drowning she means, not freedom. I swam fine. Don’t you get it, O Death, my mother is elegant alive, entering the blue hole of evening, alone. You could reach into the frame, pull her out. O Death, I’ve been crueler— I’ve watched.
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Inheritance: PoemsFrom"Trans is against nostalgia"
I’ve picked up the hammer everyday
and forgiven myself. There is a new
language I’m learning by speaking it.
I’m a blind cartographer, I know the way
fearing the distance. O New Day,
there isn’t a part of you I don’t love
to fear. I’m holding hands with
the poet speaking of light, saying I made it up
I made it up.
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“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 [on Inheritance]
“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
“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
A stunning debut marked by deep listening – to language and silence, to the body's unmaking and becoming. Unafraid of go-for-broke lyricism, Taylor Johnson writes poems of steely subtlety that sing of desire, a hunger for fresh language and forms. "What gender should I be in this sound?," asks the poet in lines that are as urgent to our moment as they are metaphysical. His work is distilled, lean; beneath this translucent surface, a vulnerable questing shimmers.