109 pages
Published 2023
Read February 5
Rating: 5 out of 5
Taylor Byas is one of our greatest contemporary poets. Whenever I read her poems — which always find the flow and grace in even the most rigid forms, always mix wry observation with devastating revelation — it’s like a classroom. Her words communicate in ways that make me wonder if I ever said anything real in my life. Where my own poetry obscures my trauma and fears under sedimentary layers of jargon, Byas reveals truths in sideways glances, in moments of shattering clarity.
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is an exploration of growing up. Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, growing up the child of an alcoholic father, growing up groomed for childbearing, growing up in a society that doesn’t consider your body to be whole in and of itself. It is an exploration of a society that dehumanizes and demonizes Blackness.
It is also an exploration of religion and technicolor eroticism, of possession and loss, of navigating sexuality and relationships with men who also learned to view your body as theirs. It is an exploration of what gets taken away.
A running list of particular favorites:
The “South Side” sequence
“Blackberrying”
“The Early Teachings”
“You from ‘Chiraq’?”
“Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright)”
“Yes, the Trees Sing”
“The Gathering Place — Grandma’s House”
“Wreckage”
“A Diagram with Hands”
“Cloud Watching”
“Dream in Which You Cuff Me to the Bed”
“Men Really Be Menning: On Dating”
“The Mercy Hour: A Burning Haibun”
“If I Could Love Life into Him”
“mother”
“Drunken Monologue from an Alcoholic Father’s Oldest Daughter”
“I Spy”
“The Way a Chicago Summer Comes”
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