Winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2023 Four Quartets Prize
Finalist for the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
Finalist for the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award
Finalist for the 2023 Balcones Prize for Poetry
“This is not the cold archival work of gathering facts from acid-free boxes but archive as grieving, improvisation, autobiography and kinship. In examining Harlins’ life, Taylor also creates a mirror or double of her own.”—Ryan Lee Wong, Los Angeles Times
“A provocative and visually fascinating book. . . . This is a book you need to read and see in its entirety.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“This is a monumental work in the vein of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen from a remarkable new talent.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Arresting and powerful. . . . Simply put, one of the best books this reviewer has read in the last 12 months.”— Library Journal, starred review
“Concentrate is astonishing.”—David L. Ulin, Alta Journal
“This is a book that has many layers and forces the reader to not look away, to see alongside the poet, to bear witness beyond the Black female body and into the very soul of humanity.”—Angela María Spring, Washington Independent Review of Books
“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 […]”—Cindy Juyoung Ok, Harriet Books
“Through this diverse curation, Taylor underscores the importance of more honest witnessing, of a history that includes all the moving parts, including ourselves.”—Taylor Byas, Cincinnati Review
“Taylor shows us the plasticity of this word by braiding language together, just as her auntie spins gold from her scalp.”—Ashia Ajani, Split Lip Magazine
“Breathtaking, brilliant, and radical––Concentrate is the mouth that refuses to swallow America’s blackest desires, which have too long centered their wealth on the lives and deaths of Black girls and women. Taylor's debut is a deftly woven journey that offers us historical and psychic perspectives that are intimate and expansive, as these poems drag us, by syntax and grace, to our nation's threshing floor, which must be the page and the body. These poems guide readers through graphic meditations on guilt, innocence, innuendo, and how the constructs of form construct, and often destroy, any easy recognition of justice, or Self. Instead, we are seated, with bent heads, between the knees of an unbroken voice that demands to be heard and heeded. Extraordinary in craft, Taylor’s fearless poems appraise the arc of bullets and bodies devoured by America’s great hard dream. Incandescent in her excavation of language, and the perils of its erasure, Taylor breathes through every side of this wound. Concentrate is a tongue that fiercely grips the edges of love and memory before all is ripped loose. How fortunate to discover Taylor’s imagination, and her uncompromising heart, in such a world.”—Rachel Eliza Griffiths, judge's statement for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize
“Tensed into lopsided dichotomies, how do we anarchy the prevailing narratives that are jigsawed, sinewed, tentacled in white supremacy? In Courtney Faye Taylor’s incandescent, unflinching debut, Concentrate, the poet-artist is excavator, curator, collagist, sleuth, archivist. To mend then transcend, we must name complicity and its complexities: ‘south central / the valley / loiterer/ merchant / free huey / yellow peril supports black power / menace / menaced / riots / sa-i-gu / the los angeles black-korean alliance / black lives matter.’ Taylor textures fraught terrain, invisibled yet hyper-rendered, predatory—oppressed to be erased—making an alembic for the agency inherent in every living being, to oracle another future that is never guaranteed in this messy crucible. With tender, intrepid fierceness, innovation, and audacious fidelity, we bear witness, not only to the burn, but a phoenix rising. Concentrate is medicine, testimony, quest, anthem, balm, and seed that we all seek––need.”—Su Hwang
“To read Concentrate, to engage with Concentrate, is to dip a spoon into the undiluted good stuff and lift it to your mouth. To experience the too-muchness of history as a present tense event. To become part and parcel of the formal experimentation required to language the striations of the unbearable. Courtney Faye Taylor has constructed a collection that manages to be both derived from the inmost personal and prodigiously epic. . . . It allows the reader to participate in the long haul of remembering the disremembered.”—Diane Seuss
"Concentrate should be required reading for anyone who seeks to commit themselves to Black-Asian solidarity as theory and/or practice. This is a major work, a profoundly moving anti-erasure crafted with equal parts ingenuity and care."—Franny Choi
“Courtney Faye Taylor writes a syntax vexed by memory and grief in zone upon zone of language, history, and feeling. . . . This book radiates a cry, a name, ‘an incendiary grief’ so ablaze it touches everything. Concentrate is a riotous, gorgeously unruled text forged by sisterhood and resistance, across time.”—Aracelis Girmay
★ 02/01/2023
Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Taylor's arresting and powerful debut excavates and commemorates the life of Latasha Harlins, a Black teenager killed by a Korean shop owner following a false accusation of theft—a killing that served as a catalyst for the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles. Taylor's collection explores, in part, the tension between Asian American and Black communities in the United States, as well as the country's complex interplay among race, sexual violence, and erasure. The collection also memorializes a young life, foregrounds tremendous care between elders and children (as in the brilliantly moving opening poem, "Arizona?"), and employs an inventive fractured style. "Consider that our ansisters have incredible side eye—the talent of of seeing things they are not directly looking at," says one poem, and it's a talent amply on display throughout the book, which utilizes visual and textual collage, time line, historical artifact, and personal story to reassemble an unflinching narrative of honesty, attention, and intimacy. VERDICT Simply put, one of the best books this reviewer has read in the last 12 months.—Amy Dickinson
