Concentrate
Courtney Faye Taylor’s astonishing debut, Concentrate, is full of lines: from “bloodline” and “gumline” to “clothesline” and “finish line,” from “laugh lines” to “chalklines.” The collection’s speaker is getting her hair pressed by an aunt when she learns of Latasha Harlins, a Black 15-year-old murdered in a Los Angeles Korean liquor store by storeowner Soon Ja Du (“She of a color but not ours”) in 1991. When Taylor travels to Los Angeles “to handle the archive […] to earn the facts and their phantoms firsthand,” she finds a mural depicting Harlins’s face alongside a 12-line poem she wrote shortly before her death: “I care by / giving what I have.” The poet walks lines of graves searching for Harlins, knowing that the cemetery owners had exhumed many bodies to resell plots, a cruelty predicted in Taylor’s own grade school poem, which appears in full in the book: “I worry that there will not be enough room for people on the earth in the future.”
Several black pages place words related to Black American and East Asian American histories on either side of white vertical center lines: “cotton” and “free huey” on the left, “cane” and “yellow peril supports black power” on the right. Connective terms signifying shared experiences, for example, in plantation labor, are placed near one another, with words and phrases like “lynchings” and “the los angeles black-korean alliance” occasionally interrupting the vertical lines. By both implementing and undermining these lines, Taylor refuses binaries and intimates that true solidarity does not come through sameness, or even comparison.
The book includes an overarching timeline that “detail[s] a sermon of interactions” between Harlins and her murderer, mostly mediated through others’ experiences of “[s]econdhand horrors.” One page begins, affectingly pragmatic: “Rape is a room within every cishet man [… ] locked or onerously doorless. There’s no hotline there.” Taylor’s lines disrupt even as they create and assemble, remembering Latasha Harlins and mourning the life sentences meted out to Black girls and women: “So far my sentence as a Black woman has been hard to hone, homed in sore white pith.”