Jason Floyd Williams’ Inheritance Tax: A Review by Adam Palumbo

Last week, my grandfather’s health deteriorated rapidly while traveling to my cousin’s wedding in Houston, Texas.

He is 82. He has led a full and adventurous life, serving in both the Second World and Korean wars. He raised five children with his beloved wife. He has faithfully managed his diabetes for 20 years and underwent a quadruple bypass in 1998. He is the man I admire most in this world. He is the man who made me who I am, my father’s father.

My whole family has been anticipating this dreadful time, but now we must all come to terms with the inevitable. He is the patriarch of 26 grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren, a proud Sicilian thoroughbred, but even he knows the truth—that death is just around the corner.

Jason Floyd Williams’ collection Inheritance Tax chronicles a life and the painful overlap of its preceding lives, its kin. The speaker is preoccupied with the physical presence of his family and the stories they tell, forging a sort of proto-American mythology within the poems. At 207 pages it is a rather heavy volume of verse, but Williams’ easy-going style is an addicting read. His simple diction and raw narrative may seem lowbrow to some, but do not be fooled. As great poets should, Williams moves from the “thing” to the “idea,” creating passages of sparkling symbolism and emotion. Avoiding the temptation to politicize or pontificate as a lesser poet might, Williams instead displays a talent for the understated allegorical. Part 6 of the poem ‘career choices’ reads:

He detoxed himself.

A 2-decade career sweated out

over a week of

nightmares involving

disembowelment, snakes, fleas.

When he was ready

to give up, he asked

Christ for help.

Just to sleep w/out

the nightmares.

Carvaggio should’ve painted

this Conversion.

Religion has its place within the poet’s world; the Apostle Luke’s conclusion to the Parable of the Prodigal Son opens the collection. However, the speaker is as comfortable quoting the Norse goddesses of Fate and referencing Cerebus as he is with the Gospels. As the deadpan tone of the excerpt above shows, religiosity is of little use to the speaker in confronting the harsh stigmas of the world. Instead, Inheritance Tax is woven from a tapestry of Midwestern biker bars, unsuccessful suicides, and—as the title suggests—a certain anxiety about repeating our forbearers’ mistakes.

Williams has developed a unique voice, both humorous and unsettling, and with it crafts a specialized mood of both remembrance and regret. The reader will no doubt be enthralled by the many stories, but the most surprising aspect of Williams’ writing is how the frustrations of the speaker are recreated for the reader. After recounting the tale of Keith (an old acquaintance who throttled his grandmother), the pokerfaced poet ends the poem ‘children of divorce’ with a haphazard personal note:

Some kids are better at

dealing w/ divorce than others.

I never choked anyone—

I only wrecked every vehicle

I could get my hands on.

Williams reminds us that literature is a representation, a retelling of our stories so that others may benefit. Reality weighs heavily upon him, and it is his poems that help him to deal with the disappointments of existence. Pain must be turned into art and the poet does his best to create “stories like wet concrete that eventually harden into memory.”

As a master of understatement, Williams revels in his art of leaving the reader in a tepid sort of mood; in the poet’s own words, a “gutpunch disappointment.”

The specter of the speaker’s grandfather cues the most well-formed and compelling stories in the collection. These tales hits an emotional register that is nearly lost in Williams’ conversational language, but beneath lurks a fervent honesty. In ‘incomplete metamorphosis’ the speaker gives a look into the life of his elder relative, sparing the reader no sad details:

His daily medication count

was 37 pills.

That was 37 different pills

to deal w/ diabetes, high blood pressure,

bad liver, depression, etc.

Some pills were just on

the list to balance the

after effects—the body’s seismic

utterances to pioneering tablets.

So his golden years became one long

run on sentence, a traffic blur,

a winter storm.

Everyone has felt a heart-gripping fear for a loved one, but Williams’ poetry gives that fear a voice, and it is this sort of writing that eases the pain of existence. Inheritance Tax is a book that reminds us that poetry is more than a language unto itself; real lives are displayed for the reader, regardless of their fears and tensions. Death is just around the corner—for all of us. But writing is not something that can keep death away. It just helps to know that we can glean strength from our previous generations to keep living and breathing and enduring.

Reading this collection in the wake of my own grandfather’s health struggles, I cannot help but project my own associations, logic, and fears onto the world of the poem. But this is the way poetry is supposed to work, right? Poetry should not aim to be a one-sided rhetoric, but a conversation in which the poet can instruct and delight the reader, and the reader can decipher the poet’s meanings out of language and apply them to their own attitude. Time and effort are involved in reading poetry as much as in writing it.  In order for the reader to take something away from the poem, they must first put something into it.