In her third collection of poetry, Heather Taylor Johnson celebrates the liminal spaces between two cultures – the neither here nor there, the neither in nor out. It is indeed a world where ‘Home is a relative term’.
Thirsting for Lemonade is an affirmation of the migrant’s acceptance of never-quite-belonging, and still it is her attempt to forge new paths in foreign, and remembered, territory, where past is always present.
These poems recall the many things which get us home – photographs, a common cereal, a record album, a fooseball table. This latest collection is a celebration of ‘the things that are especially good / because they cannot last.’
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
From the opening poem’s narrative of mortality and impermanence to the ruminations on travel and transience in the final piece, the poems in Thirsting For Lemonade provide an engaging perspective on life across and in between nations, continents and social landscapes. Family, memory, cultural mores and diasporic musings form the fascinating content of these poems, but it is their speaker’s levity, insight and generosity of spirit that makes them a pleasure to read. I recommend this book to all readers who have felt, as Taylor Jonson has, that ‘no earth has ever been theirs to claim.’
– Ali Alizadeh, poet, novelist, critic and playwright
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Like all good exiles, Taylor Johnson lives in two worlds and can’t let go of either one. That’s damn good news for her readers of her poetry, who find in that tension, that divided self, that straddling of two continents a powerful voice of reflection and desire, of desperate holding on—to the past, to the moment, to what is at times a fragile identity, both anchored and unmoored by something as mundane, and as miraculous, as a box of Cheerios from America.
– Steve Watkins, author of What Comes After and Down Sand Mountain, winner of the 2009 Golden Kite Award for Fiction
IP (Interactive Publications Pty Ltd) –
Heather Taylor Johnson writes about the things that matter and some things that didn’t seem to matter before. Her poems are digressive, surprising, vital, and will find readers beyond poetry’s forts and ghettos.
– Aiden Coleman