LOW: Notes on Art & Trash, Jaydra Johnson. Fonograf Editions, 3145 NE 13th Avenue, Portland, OR 97212, 2024, 152 pages, $17.95 paper, www.fonografeditions.com.
Jaydra Johnson’s Low: Notes on Art & Trash is not the book I expected, and thank god for that. I came in bracing for a detached artsy dissection of garbage-as-medium—the kind of thing that smells faintly of gallery wine and performative despair. What I got instead was a propulsive, poetic love letter to the discarded: women, whores, the poor, the broken, the lowborn, and yes, trash itself.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part semiotic meditation, Johnson’s collection reads like a fistful of confetti thrown at a funeral: startling, beautiful, and maybe a little inappropriate. Across five essays, she rummages through language, visual culture, history, and her own lived experience to stitch together something whole out of scraps.
She is not here to sanitize. She’s here to reclaim. Born poor, white, and female in a trailer park, Johnson writes with a kind of ferocious honesty, as if daring the reader to look away from what they’d usually flinch at. Trash started as a lie against a woman, she writes in her essay “Broken Crown.” But in her hands, trash becomes lineage, legacy, and lens.
In “Other People’s Toilets,” she reflects on collage as both medium and metaphor. It is not easy to make garbage beautiful, she admits, but she tries anyway, assembling found images like prayers whispered in gum wrappers and broken glass. Her collages, reproduced as interstitials between essays, serve not just as visual palate cleansers but as semiotic reinforcements: layered compositions where meaning, much like trash, piles up in messy, poetic strata. (Side note: the use of color in these pieces is loaded. Bubblegum pinks and penitentiary blues speak in their own syntax.)
The essays themselves are elastic, meandering—building tension, releasing it. Johnson compares each one to a rubber band, snapping at the end with just enough kinetic energy to make you turn the page. She name-drops Othello, Madame Bovary, the Bible—all the usual suspects that taught us to equate women and waste. But instead of quoting them reverently, she dissects them with a box cutter. It started with Shakespeare, she writes. There is blood everywhere in Othello… When others discover the carnage, Iago gropes for a plausible scapegoat… He picks the whore. Johnson doesn’t flinch—she follows the trail of blame, right down to the word “trash.”
Trash started as a lie against a woman.
In “Art Under Duress,” she explores the prison poetry of Etheridge Knight as both artistic act and survival mechanism. In “On Holes,” she descends—metaphorically and literally—into the void. There are lower places to go than the gutter, she writes. You can go underground. You can go to the hole. Later, she defines holeness as the shapely voids left by shoplifters on mega-mart shelves… the highway air coursing through our holes. Absence becomes a character. Emptiness, a kind of presence. A void that can be named.
And throughout, she returns to one quiet, radical idea: that trash doesn’t discriminate. It’s the great equalizer. We all have bad breath. We all break things. We all leave something behind.
Johnson doesn’t just write about trash. She writes through it, building a grammar of the discarded that reads like an apology, a manifesto, and a map.
Also, as a French speaker, I have to fact-check one moment: the book references the French verb “trasier” as a term meaning “to erase.” Jaydra, I loved the book, but tragiquement, that verb does not exist. Still, I appreciate the gesture. The invented verb becomes its own artifact, its own kind of linguistic litter.
Low made me want to dig through my own mental junk drawer and ask what I’ve mislabeled as worthless. At its core, Johnson’s book is a reclamation project: of language, of origin, of bodies and stories and the messy truths we’re taught to throw away.
You don’t read Low to feel clean. You read it to feel seen.
Anaïs Godard is a Franco-American writer and cultural critic with a background in semiotics and linguistics. A 2025 Letter Review Prize winner, she began her career reviewing art for ARTE Magazine in France before transitioning into TV production in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s, Mensa Bulletin, Women on Writing, and is forthcoming in Fractured Lit. Her reviews explore meaning-making, symbolism, and cultural memory through a feminist lens. She co-founded @nastywomenLA and leads storytelling workshops for children. More at www.anaisgodard.com