Winner of the Four Quartets Prize

Winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Finalist for NAACP Image Awards

Finalist for Lambda Literary Awards

Finalist for Heartland Booksellers Award

Finalist for Society of Midland Authors Award

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 Korean American shopkeeper, 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 uprisings, and came to exemplify the long-fraught relationship between Black and Asian American communities in the United States.

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.”

Praise

“This is not the cold archival work of gathering facts from acid-free boxes but archive as grieving, improvisation, autobiography and kinship.”

— Ryan Lee Wong, The 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

“Arresting and powerful. . . Simply put, one of the best books this reviewer has read in the last 12 months.”

— Library Journal

"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, author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On