This story first appeared in The Kansas City Star on April 7, 2024.

Chicago poet Taylor Byas left home on a path of discovery. She met colorful characters along the way, encountered danger and beauty, and learned that what she sought was inside her all along.

This story probably sounds familiar.

Byas’ poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times — winner of the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award — borrowed some scaffolding from the 1978 musical The Wiz, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. (By coincidence, the Broadway tour is coming to KC in 2025.)

In keeping with Dorothy’s epic journey, Byas didn’t discover the similarities in her story until the end — that is, until late in the editing process.

“(The book) was about finding love and realizing that it was always in the poems and that I had so much of it,” Byas told FYI Book Club participants via Zoom from her home in Ohio. “And I was looking for it, and it was in me the whole time; I was loving everybody around me the whole time.”

Fifteen readers recently met with the FYI Book Club leader, Kaite Stover, the director of readers’ services at the Kansas City Public Library, at BLK + BRWN Bookstore in Kansas City. Each meeting takes place at a different location.

Among those readers was Melissa Ferrer Civil, whom Mayor Quinton Lucas named Kansas City’s first poet laureate in February.

Civil didn’t need to be told about the love thread winding through the book.

“Something I’m obsessed with doing recently is reading the first lines and last lines of both poems and books,” Civil said.

Byas’ first line: “This is what teaches me love.” And the last line: “Of all things love, I’m still learning.”

To Civil, that “spoke volumes” about the process a reader is entering when opening the book.

“Even if one doesn’t have the same exact experiences, I feel like in some way, a lot of people can relate to the idea of wrestling with your upbringing, wrestling with your home life, wrestling with your city,” Civil said. “And, at the same time, having a love for your city, your home, your family.”

Participants — anyone in the metro can join; see details below — knew the feeling of looking critically at formative, and maybe even beloved, people and institutions.

Lucy Donnelly, the readers’ services specialist at the Library, pointed to the poem “The Early Teaching,” which deals with Catholic school lessons about staving off temptation — a girl’s job.

“‘Cover your shoulders’ was such a poignant reference in this because so much of religiosity is that it’s on the woman, and it’s on the girl, to protect the guy,” Donnelly said.

Hanna Cusick of Brookside said, “The imagery of being a child and growing up, there’s the usual childhood pain, but not the things she’d encounter later in life. … You start off as a blank slate, but every experience in your life colors that slate and embeds new scars as well as positive things and more clean skin.”

Poet and book club participant Annie Newcomer of Prairie Village went to Catholic school. “What you learn in school, you come home, and that’s usually what your mom would echo to you,” she said.

Denise Fletcher of South Kansas City said, “For most of us to see our parents as we age, their foibles and mistakes they’ve made … you’ve had them on this pedestal, and then you recognize things they’ve done that have led them to decisions they made.”

Several poems look at the narrator’s parents — the poetry isn’t necessarily autobiographical — particularly one called “Drunken Monologue From an Alcoholic Father’s Oldest Daughter.” The alcoholic father calls the daughter, trapping her in the role of a therapist or mother.

The call forces the narrator to dig deep for answers about her parents’ struggles individually, as a couple, and as parents. The narrator must examine everything so that she can continue to “ease on down the road,” so to speak – a Wiz song title that Byas took as one of the book’s section headings.

BLK + BRWN owner Cori Smith said that, so often, getting through toxic relationships is about survival.

“I think about how many elders in my own ecosystem have been through truly traumatic situations, but their only hope of survival was being able to create a box and kind of compartmentalize that,” Smith said, “and then not have to open it back up, for better or worse.”

Later in the collection, the bruises and scars are passed from one generation to the next, maybe in an unopened box, maybe laid bare.

In the poem “Painted Tongue,” Byas writes: “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.”

But the group wants to know more about this tradition. Which is it: More like handing down heirlooms or more like something bought and sold.

Civil said, “I think in this poem, ‘Painted Tongue,’ she’s kind of reconciling this idea that, Oh, this trauma that I find in my relationships is also the trauma that lived in my parents’ relationship.”

Then Civil returned to the idea of innocence, referring to the first pages of the book and the poem “Blackberrying,” about events that set deep, lingering stains in the fabric of childhood.

Though maybe they look harmless enough at first.

Byas wrote: “Blackberries pricked by thumbnail,/ an accidental murder, my own miscalculation of what the black skin/ could endure./ … The evenings always end in taste — the sweet syrup drying like/ blood on our lips.”

The poet said that while writing “Blackberrying,” she thought of the ways Black children often have an early knowledge of the consequences of just being who they are and the dangers of the adult life around them.

“Even beneath these various childlike, and what should be innocent, interactions there’s always this darker, deeper knowledge that informs everything that young Black youth are engaging in,” Byas said.

She described how the children of the poem throw blackberries that double as bombs, and “they’re playing these games, but there’s also the violence that sort of mimics being arrested. All of these things are programmed into our childhood.”

But once she’s found her way back to her childhood home at the end of the journey, after exposing toxic relationships, long-standing longings and regrets, parents’ private struggles, and the ugly side of a community — is that problematic?

That is, the book club wondered, what will Byas’ family think of the collection?

Byas said she made sure everyone was represented as human. “There are no Disney villains. No one is all good or all bad.”

No witches.

And she said, this is her truth. “I have every right to share it, and there are people out there who need to encounter it to know that they are not alone.”

Smith, the bookstore owner, said that as someone from Kansas, she gravitated toward the title of the collection, even before she read it. “Any references to The Wizard of Oz, I get it.”

As a Black woman, she heard in the title exhaustion and hope and “I’m trying.”

“That notion of it’s always been in you, you are everything that you need yourself to be; it’s already there,” Smith said. “And just the sentiment of like, ‘Well, I done tried it. I’ve tried. So that felt relatable. It felt like being seen.”

Meet the Author

Taylor Byas will speak to Melissa Ferrer Civil, Kansas City’s poet laureate, at 6 p.m. April 11 at the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library. RSVP

Join the Club

The Kansas City Star and the Kansas City Public Library present a book-of-the-moment selection every few months and invite the community to read along. To participate in the next discussion led by Kaite Stover, the Library’s director of readers’ services, email kaitestover@kclibrary.org.