On the next page, Taylor provides a photo of the new market that stands in its place, Numero Uno Market, and a few pages later, I am given Taylor’s stark black-and-white photograph of the juice fridge inside of the store. In my mind, LA easily took shape, its architecture and aesthetic now recognizable in the old photograph of Empire Liquor. Just over a month before reading this book, I’d gone to LA for the first time. For a while, I didn’t understand what was at the root of my strong emotional response to these pictures, but then I realized that it was my own discomfort. In Concentrate, Taylor takes her reader along with her on a photographic journey in Los Angeles, where she visits places Latasha frequented during her life, the place of her death, and finally the cemetery where Latasha was buried. Even as I interacted with those images, those people and places remained inaccessible, impossible to truly conjure up in my mind. But I also remember feeling so distant from those images, some merely sketches or drawings of places that no longer exist, others black-and-white photos of what felt like another world. You might still be thinking of your old college textbooks and saying, But these had images and photographs too, and you’d be right. But unlike the history books of my childhood, Taylor’s history is alive on the page, feels close enough to change. Across these different mediums, Taylor documents the history of Latasha Harlins’s murder by a Korean shop owner who falsely accused Latasha of stealing a bottle of orange juice. Taylor’s background as both a poet and visual artist shine through in this collection, in collages, clippings of images, small drawings, and photographs taken by the author herself. So when I finally read Courtney Faye Taylor’s debut poetry collection, Concentrate (Graywolf, 2022), I was fascinated by how this book models what a fuller, rounder account of history can look like. I’ve been thinking about the true nature of witnessing, of what it means to interact with our histories. This was a history that was wholly incomplete. This was a history that made America look good. At the foundation of my curriculum was always colonial conquest, war, an elaborate flexing of power. Associate Editor Taylor Byas: If I return (begrudgingly) to the pages of my old history textbooks, I am met with the high sheen of those glossy pages, artistic renderings of things and places we have little to no photographic evidence of, figures and charts to help illustrate the particular brand of history taught in schools.
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