All the Lands We Inherit

All the Lands We Inherit is a searing, heartbreaking, and formally inventive debut memoir about family, legacy, and identity. The story centers around the increasingly tense relationship between the author and her mother, a deeply religious woman who has become self-isolated and recalcitrant amidst her many crises: failing health, financial woes, and the accumulated effects of long-untreated traumas.

As the lyric vignettes weave back and forth through time, Price investigates the ways that matrilineal legacy have shaped her mother, and how that shaping comes to bear on the author herself. In this deeply personal lyric memoir, the past becomes at once a backdrop and an active force, a thing that underlies everything that happens in the present day. From survival to substance abuse to born again Christianity, the materials of her matriarchs’ lives inform, if not preordain, the realities of the author’s own life. Ultimately, All the Lands We Inherit asks: How much do we owe to those who came before us? And how much of ourselves do we own?

Darby Price was born and raised in Southeast Louisiana. She earned her BA at Florida State University and her MFA at George Mason University. Her poetry has appeared in No Contact, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Redivider, and Zó calo Public Square. Her reviews and interviews have appeared in The Collagist and The Southeast Review. She has taught literature, creative writing, and rhetoric to students from K-12 through college, and has developed curriculum for PEN America, UC Irvine, and WriteGirl Los Angeles. Darby is a Continuing Lecturer at UC Irvine and makes her home in Long Beach, CA.