Plethora Juxtaposes: An Interview with Taylor Byas about I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times
Sneha Subramanian Kanta: It is always a pleasure to converse, Taylor. Congratulations on all the awards and recognition for I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. Would you share your experience of titling the collection and how it speaks to the larger themes within the book?
Taylor Byas: So the title is inspired by The Wiz, a movie that is really crucial to my own childhood and even those early bonding experiences with my family. This is a movie that I turned to often for comfort. I didn’t realize back then how meaningful it was to have access to this fantasy that centered a Black woman and her experiences and concerns. It was one of my earliest exposures to media in which I could see what it looked like for a Black woman to figure out who she was. Once this book started to form, I realized that a story similar to Dorothy’s was starting to form, and so I wanted a title that was connected to The Wiz and that was also recognizable enough that people would get that connection from the title right away. Most people recognize the gesture of clicking the heels three times, so it felt perfect. It’s also the final gesture that finally gets Dorothy back in the movie. She realizes that she had the power to change her circumstances all along, and that was so meaningful and powerful to me. And my book is a book about home and how it shifts when we leave it. It all come together for me.
Sneha: Place is an important dimension in the poems. I like the fact that you do not necessarily romanticize location, rather, the elements of violence and the body are brought forth as subterranean. In “Blackberrying”, the poem after Plath, the ending lines “The evenings always end in taste— the sweet syrup drying like / blood on our lips.” embody a different knowledge. In what ways is place situated in your work?
Taylor: What likely happens is that my previous days as a fiction writer step in and start to change the shape of my poems. As a result, I often approach my poems with a deep concern about setting, and setting ends up being more important in my poems than it might typically be. Poems don’t necessarily need setting in the same way stories might, but because my poems are also so narrative-heavy, I feel the need to build a world that the story can unfold inside of. And that world also becomes a place that the reader can step into as well. Because of this formal concern about setting, the places that I live in and travel to and interact with in my every day life just become that much more important. Literal geography starts to creep in. And place changes everything; what the nighttime feels like, what the weather does, what animals I need to be concerned about. For me and my poems, there’s always an environment to build, and the places I know always influence what that looks like.
Sneha: I’m going to bring attention to two poems. In “The Early Teachings”, the lines “Your safety is your responsibility / at the party you didn’t want to go to.” are powerful for the dichotomies of agency and hypervigilance. There is a correlation to another poem “Jeopardy! (The Category Is Birthright). The poem concludes with “What is: like a bindle, because I will always be without / a home.” In writing about girlhood, the narrative metamorphoses into becoming a woman. How do you approach interweaving vulnerability with reckoning the world we live?
Taylor: I think a dichotomy of agency and hypervigilance is 100% accurate. That dichotomy is very much at the heart of being a woman, a Black woman in particular. There is a part of me that celebrates the agency that I have today, which I know was not always possible (historically speaking). But then there is a lingering bitterness for all of the ways that I still can’t be truly and fully vulnerable in this world. I’m mad at all of the ways I still have to be so protective, of all of the threats I face on a daily basis. It gets tiring. Simultaneously, living in this woman as a woman of color is an inherently vulnerable existence. We are never not vulnerable to harm. And we must be vulnerable to go out into the world and expose ourselves to potential harm in order to find friendship, romantic love, career success, a political landscape that doesn’t try to kill us. We are always toeing that line.
Sneha: There is a leading into the body as your book progresses. The poem “A Diagram with Hands” begins with “My aunt tells me, Those hips are screaming / for twins and I want to stop…”. You write about the body with comparison, contrast, and undertones. There is a musicality in how things are revealed and hidden yet again. What does it mean for you to address the body in your poems with agency and knowing?
Taylor: The agency and knowing that you speak to feels like the opposite of what I talk about in “The Early Teachings,” which is how I’ve been socialized to think about my body as a young Black girl and as a girl who also grew up going to Catholic schools. So much about the body was obscured by men’s desires. In the Black household, the Black girl is held responsible for the uncontrollable lust of her male counterparts, both her age and much older. In church and Catholic school, the body was a thing that could get you in trouble with a male God, and it was also a thing you were supposed to save for your male husband (which would suggest that the body was a thing that wasn’t really yours at all). My book says “This body belongs to me, and I can give it to who I please, it can be pleased by who I allow, and I can allow myself to feel pleasure, to have desires and fulfill them.”
Sneha: I particularly adore your work which engages the divine. In “Let Us Do Nothing”, momentum builds up in the lines “You needed to / go to the store, but / I expedited / my prayer for a free car / wash. And so it pours,…”. Your poem reminds the reader of how small acts of faith can appear in their lives. There is a transcendence in the narrative where you invoke the divine. Would you share the ideas which led you to engage with these myriad themes?
Taylor: One of the arguments this book tries to make is that the divine is everywhere, including in the erotic. I feel like religious teaching so often want to keep the divine and the erotic separate, but I believe they coexist and often inhabit the same spaces. The erotic is sacred. The pedestrian ways that we connect to others, that ways that we love, have faith in small things, those are divine acts. Are there not these undertones of awe and ecstasy in religious rituals? We consume the body and blood of Christ as sacrament. Is it not also sacred when we shared our bodies with other humans in similar ways, erotically? These are the questions that were in my mind as I wrote this book.
Sneha: “Conversion”, with the subtitle “On Cincinnati’s Covered Churches, God, and Lucifier” is one of my favorite poems in the book. The lines “I sit / and mouth the Father, Son, the Holy Spirit / with every touch, on beat, like a rap song lyric” are interlaced with an awareness of being. Attention is a form of prayer. Your poem is a lyrical psalm for the self. Do you incorporate a specific pattern of taking these everyday notes that make an appearance in your poems?
Taylor: I’m not sure there’s a “pattern,” but there’s definitely a regular practice of incorporating notes from everyday life into poems. I collect notes in my notes app on my phone or in a small notebook that I carry around, and I keep collecting until eventually things start to feel connected or speak to one another. This is when I know its time for a poem to be written. A lot of my poems are written that way, and that’s likely what you’re sensing, those lines or images or language that have quite literally been snipped from my life. And that usually where I feel the heart of the poems are, around those notes that were captured during an organic moment of inspiration.
Sneha: I’m certain our readers would be delighted to know what you are currently working on and of your life after the PhD at The University of Cincinnati.
Taylor: I’m juggling three projects in the air right now because I’m lucky enough to be in a space where I feel really free to branch out and work on different things. I’m working on a craft book on poetic form, which is what is getting the most of my time and energy at the moment. I’m also working on a tentative collection of lyric essays, and my third full-length poetry collection as well!
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), was a September 2025 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary.