Today’s GalleyCrush is Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance, forthcoming from Alice James Books on November 10, 2020.
Perfect pitch: “Inheritance is a black sensorium, a chapel of color and sound that speaks to spaciousness, surveillance, identity, desire, and transcendence.”
First lines: “Since I quit that internet service, I’m thinking more about the transitive properties in books. The words, the palimpsest of images accruing in my brain, but more immediately the book in my hand. The cover worn at one end from sweat and gripping it when it comes close.”
Big blurb: “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
Book notes: Paperback, poetry, 100 pages.
Author bio: Taylor Johnson is from Washington, D.C. They’ve received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, the Conversation Literary Festival, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among other organizations. In 2017, Taylor received the Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Their poems appear in the Baffler, Indiana Review, Scalawag, and the Paris Review, among other publications.
