With vivid imagery and a staggering wit, Taylor Byas paints portraits of her childhood on the south side and the city in warm hues. I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times leads her quest for self-discovery with grief, longing, and the late-night monologuing of a seasoned writer. With poems modeled after the likes of Patricia Smith and Claudia Rankine, the collection wears its influences on its sleeve and rides its momentum forward.
Taylor Byas in conversation with Tara Betts and Raych Jackson
Fri 9/8 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, free, registration required womenandchildrenfirst.com/event/person-i-done-clicked-my-heels-three-times-taylor-byas
Out this month by Soft Skull, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is the first full-length poetry collection from Byas, a Chicago native with a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Inspired by the 1978 cult classic The Wiz, Byas’s collection mimics Dorothy’s metaphoric journey from home to Oz and back again. Between Chicago, Birmingham, and Cincinnati, Byas is thinking of the south side, even when she’s far from the trail leading home.
Each section title cribs from songs in the musical, charting a course from adolescence to adulthood. The book is equal parts deep-seated nostalgia and delayed catharsis. From smashing blackberries in the yard after school to “the way a siren becomes a mother too,” Byas’s poetry inhabits a soft and harsh world. Past brownstones and brightly lit corner stores, Byas etches out the beauty in the most mundane parts of Chicago with a reflective eye.
The poems recast home and identity in a new light, capturing old memories in sharp focus.
As the lyrics push forward, the narrator leaves behind failed lovers, grows to womanhood with all its hardships, and makes more room for grief and longing—for family and for knowing that who you are comes from them, whether you like it or not. Her poetry feels striking, offering answers and probing emotions in a matter-of-fact tone. In “Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright),” the narrator offers game-show responses to what she has inherited from a father she has already announced as dead to her.
For $800: What people mean when they say I am “my father’s child”
What is: we look alike
What is: time filled my purse with parts of him whether
I wanted them or not
What is: I got the same grape-swollen cheeks, his button nose
Sewn into the geography of my face
What is: if I owe him and never what he owes me
“Painted Tongue” describes the narrator’s mother and their becoming mirrors of one another—inheriting each other’s pain like keepsake jewelry.
The saying goes, Like mother like
daughter. What then, if mother
is rag doll, fresh canvas to ink?
We twist and turn in the mirror,
my mother and I becoming each other,
her bruises and scars passed down,
family heirlooms that will take
me decades to stop wearing,
to sell.
A scattered trail of seven “South Side” poems maps a path from beginning to end. They offer brief glimpses of neighbors cooking on their balconies, sketches of boys taught to be too tough, and blocks where love and violence intermingle. In “(South Side (V),” she writes, “To those who come after, this is the law of the town—the South Side is not a place, but a state of being.”
The collection shines brightest in its childhood scenes, but her verses also bring a penchant for the cinematic. In “This Kill Bill Scene Has Me Thinking About Weave and Girl-Fights,” her poetic eye lingers on what it means to lose hair in a fight—matching Tarantino’s fighters to Black girls brawling on the pavement.
The cameras linger on the weave yanked from
owners and updo, and the crowd’s uproaris something like exit music. But we know
this is no samurai’s death. No one lives this down.
Just as striking, “Yellow Dress” offers a recut of Beyonce in Lemonade’s “Hold Up” with a baseball bat at the ready, high-stepping through her rage in heels. “I knew you’d come undone,” Byas writes. “I screamed at the screen when you swiped / the baseball bat from the kid and readied your swing / your full-mouthed smile the cue / to fuck shit up.” She smashes windshields and cracks a cap off a fire hydrant while the narrator takes mental notes and sets fire to her ex’s things.
Her humor swings and hits throughout the collection. In “Men Really Be Menning,” Byas puts her worst dating app prospects in verse—“The Tinder Guy,” “The Guy Who Has Nothing to Offer,” and “The Never Getting No-Where Guy.” The collection takes on styles inventive in form—with prose hitting the page in staccato and pulling erasure poetry from itself.
At times, Byas can dilute her metaphors with too many companions. The arc set up at the beginning—of Dorothy making her way to the land of Oz and back again—falls to the wayside in favor of the drama of individual poems. The poems stand alone but not as much together. Though as a whole, I Done Clicked My Heels offers a weighty contribution to Black Chicago’s poetry legacy.
At its heart, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is about finding home in other cities—Chicago and beyond. For Byas, the act of remembering rebuilds the city in her mind. Her foreword dedicates the collection “to the South Side of Chicago and to every place and person that has been home to me since I left you.”
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas
Soft Skull, paperback, 128 pp., $16.95, softskull.com
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