Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor

Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor

In her virtuosic debut, Courtney Faye Taylor explores the under-told history of the murder of Latasha Harlins-a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean shop owner, Soon Ja Du, after being falsely accused of shoplifting a bottle of orange juice. Harlins's murder and the following trial, which resulted in no prison time for Du, were inciting incidents of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States. Through a collage-like approach to collective history and storytelling, Taylor's poems present a profound look into the insidious points at which violence originates against-and between-women of color. Concentrate displays an astounding breadth of form and experimentation in found texts, micro-essays, and visual poems, merging worlds and bending time in order to interrogate inexorable encounters with American patriarchy and White supremacy manifested as sexual and racially charged violence. These poems demand absolute focus on Black womanhood's relentless refusal to be unseen, even and especially when such luminosity exposes an exceptional vulnerability to harm and erasure. Taylor's inventive, intimate book radically reconsiders the cost of memory, forging a path to a future rooted in solidarity and possibility. "Concentrate," she writes. "We have decisions to make. Fire is that decision to make."

Courtney Faye Taylor is a writer and visual artist. She is a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work can be found in Poetry, The Nation, Best New Poets 2020, and elsewhere.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781644452103
ISBN 10	1644452103
Title	Concentrate
Author	Courtney Faye Taylor
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Graywolf Press,U.S.
Year published	2022-11-01
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.