Inheritance
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson's singular debut explores detachment and communion from a Black trans perspective. Their speakers often situate the reader in precise locations, frequently in Washington, D.C., or natural settings outside the city, where one might " for muscadines swelling in the ditches on the waterlogged sides of the highway." Yet such locales serve as doorways into a psychic landscape that is often less certain. "Down one road in your mind you are walking alone; down another everyone is your wife," Johnson asserts in one lyrical prose piece inspired by Miles Davis. In "Trans Is Against Nostalgia," Johnson finds that "There is a new/ language I'm learning by speaking it." Such language can be as seductively musical in this collection as it is analytical ("O shipmate,/ our atlas is a chasm/ of ache"). But these considerations of semiotics and meaning are grounded in experience: "Nothing is like jail. Nothing... approximates it. Nothing is like being detained, except for being detained." Johnson makes the case that "I is a plural state/ of being," effectively demonstrating the rewards of complexity and multiplicity in these memorable poems.
