"Light That Sings Through Me": Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance
By Adrianna Smith
“I lengthen beyond what I know.” Rather than describing inheritance through the eyes of one individual as a sequential tracing of descent, Taylor Johnson, in their luminous debut collection, Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), 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, of creating multiplicity and belonging: “I is a plural state / of being.”
Johnson, a Black, trans, non-binary poet, dismantles the linearity of inheritance in their explorations of family, language, and narrative. The poems are both searching and declarative: “I tell myself to live again.” It is Johnson’s most intimate invitation that they welcome us into their way of thinking, into questions that somehow feel answered simply by the act of continuing. “Every day I build the little boat, / my body boat, hold for the unique one, / the formless soul” they write in “Trans is Against Nostalgia.” The poem continues
There is a new
language I’m learning by speaking it.
I’m a blind cartographer, I know the way
fearing the distance.
The collection’s visual art brilliantly interplays with this defiance of linearity. Strips showing only partial views of the full photograph printed at the beginning of the collection take up full pages as they face a poem. There’s no pattern to the strips—where they appear on the page, how many, at what orientation—redefining the idea of hierarchy by literally and figuratively flipping it on its head. We can still make out the original photo—a parking lot and storefront—when it appears like bars of music across the book’s seventy pages, but that’s not the point. How do we change our perspective on things we believe we know intimately: where we come from, what our body desires?
Johnson is a deep listener with an acute ear, especially on themes of identity and belonging. Their work is informed by avid reading—the few times I met Johnson, we talked about what we were reading. Yet Inheritance may be even more informed by music than by other writers: along with Gaston Bachelard and Frank Bidart, the poems reference musicians as wide-ranging as John Coltrane and Kanye West. In “Containing Continuity,” Johnson writes of listening to the contemporary trumpet player and composer, Christian Scott: I “tried to become sound…The sound was a kind of devastation across my body such that I was changed and seek out that feeling, continually.”
There are heavy, vulnerable poems about inheritance of family and place, too. In one of the book’s earlier poems, the reader confronts the shocking lines “In one myth, my grandfather was / the biggest pimp the city had seen What does family mean then? Who’s your daddy?” Part of the key to this central question—“What does family mean”—is the angle by which Johnson approaches these complicated truth/myths: at a slant, as Emily Dickinson would say. Their poems vary in visual and stylistic form, both as a whole—from long-line prose poems, to those that hug the margins, or create their own shape—and on the line-level, by playing with punctuation and spacing. There are many moments of tenderness between their grandparents, like in “Lincoln Town Car,” featured in Tracy K. Smith’s podcast “The Slowdown”: “I loved the language my grandparents spoke: saying nothing, holding both my hands.” Even when Johnson’s poems are looking to the past, there is still a movement forward, as in the breathtaking final poem “On my Way to You”:
I’m from nowhere where I’m from.
Being not monied and given to language. Given and being let go.
That distance. That I could cross it, given that you can hear me.
Inheritance is dedicated “to everyone I’ve passed in DC,” and there are many poems in Johnson’s collection that explicitly or implicitly allude to their native Washington, even if they currently live in New Orleans. “Go-Go Ode,” an allusion to the District’s only native musical form, is a celebration of desire and community: “O erotic ours…O black chaos, I’m in study / at your center, turn me out”.
I believe Johnson is one of the more important and nuanced writers to come out of DC, the city I also call home. The DC metro area is one of the most educated regions in the country (by percentage attainment of a bachelor’s degree) and also one of the most well-read. Perhaps because of that, this area is better known as a place to hear authors on their book tours than as a community that produces and nourishes writers. But the DC region has a rich history of poetry and spoken word that continues to the present. From open mics to reading series—Spit Dat, Busboys and Poets, Split this Rock and The Inner Loop (I host one, too)—it’s easy to listen to and share original, local work. To name just a few, there are a number of Gen X poets—John Murillo, Sandra Beasley, Reggie Cabico—and Boomers—E. Ethelbert Miller, Carolyn Forché, Kenneth Carroll—who either live in DC or credit the DC community with shaping their work. Johnson stands out as a fast-rising star of the millennial generation.
I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. I met Johnson several years ago at a poetry reading organized by the Folger Shakespeare Library, where last November Johnson gave a virtual headliner reading alongside poet Stephanie Burt. Inheritance is one of the most anticipated books of the winter, according to LitHub’s Book Marks, and will be featured at AWP events in March. Though this is Johnson’s first book, they have already received numerous fellowships and scholarships for their work, including the Larry Neal Writers' Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
There is a lot of light in Johnson’s collection: light that is simultaneously seen and invisible to the eye; light that escapes being held or bound; light illuminating truth while exposing the vastness of all one does not know. We hear this from the book’s opening poem, “Since I Quit that Internet Service”: “Light that did fall on me, made much of me. Light that sings through me. So I’m singing.” If these poems are made of light, then let us be their mirrors.