Attic boxes full of shards. Family stories full of secrets. A grandchild
wondering what to save and what to throw away seeks to make sense of
what it means to inherit anything at all. In The Forage House, the
speaker unravels a rich and troubling history. Some of her ancestors
were the Randolph Jeffersons, one of Virginia's most prominent
slaveholding families. Some were New England missionaries. Some were
dirt-poor Appalachians. And one was the brilliant, controversial Thomas
Jefferson. Shuttling between legend and story, history and family tale,
these poems visit cluttered attics, torn wills, and marked and unmarked
graves. Working alongside historians and archaeologists, Taylor unearths
buttons, pipes, and the accidental rubble of a busy state building its
new freeway. Based in years of research and travel, these poems form a
kind of lyric journalism, collaged from tantalizing fragments. Moving
between past and present, East and West, they reveal an uneasy
genealogist struggling with ambiguous legacies. The poems ask how
fragments exert force now. They dance between inheritance and loss,
reimagining \u201cilluminating lies.\u201d In their hunger to assemble
and remember, they also forge a new record of struggle and love:
\u201chow much I wish for will not be recorded.\u201d
