poet. writer. guide.

Sam Taylor is the author of three book of poems, Body of the World, Nude Descending an Empire, and The Book of Fools. His poems have appeared in such journals as The New Republic, AGNI, Orion Magazine, Poetry Daily, and The Kenyon Review. A native of Miami, he has been a wilderness caretaker in the mountains of northern New Mexico and traveled around the world with the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. He currently tends a wild garden in Kansas, where he directs the MFA Program at Wichita State.

"I history being person. I write time. I write books of failure,
books of corpses, books of loss, books of yes.

I am a being person. I write to be.
​I am addicted to being a man."

​from "The Book of Poetry" (Wo Shi Shiren)

Portals

The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse

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​Limited First Edition

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Pub Date: October 14, 2021
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Limited First Edition
160 Pages
​7.69x9.69 w/ Rose Cover
Vellum Flyleaf
​and 9 Color Illustrations
​

"A Masterpiece"
—David Keplinger

"{a] ravishing text..."
—Donald Revell

"Taylor brilliantly creates a 'composite canvas' to capture what it means to make art in our precarious times." 
—Craig Santos Perez​

Negative Capability Press, 2021

early review in Tupelo Quarterly
"Moments of Revelation: Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools: A Review by Lisa Low"

"Part memoir, part ecological treatise, part ars poetica, Sam Taylor’s Book of Fools practices the visual poetics of textual erasure (the disappearance of text within a text) to tell the mother-load-like story of mother-death... [T]he book’s most monumental contribution: its experimental use of language... In his taxonomy of grief, Taylor sounds no false notes. The book enraptures the reader with moments of pure, incandescent poetry."

"[a] ravishing text"

---

[THE AFTERLIFE]
Beneath the surface in a stew
The exact size of the continent
is a mother of debate.
Six times the amount of plankton.
Doesn’t biodegrade, it just   
breaks into smaller and
smaller ​pieces of fish.
Bird thinks it’s a fish.
I’m reading the
news even in my sleep.
Like a rain of.
Entering the food chain.
Like Pepsi once
upon a time, Bic Lighter, Igloo, almost like
​language
and not the gregarious
​The colors bright and consumable
People crossing, I thought.
Seven times the amount.
I’m reading in the news
even my own sleep.
The information breaking
​Into smaller and smaller
pieces of fish.
How much for The International Motel
A hundred times the amount
of Plankton, mother.
Widely known. Widely weathered
When I entered the room it was like
64% of all fish off the coast of
but for some reason I got out
And then the white car caught on fire.

Nude Descending an Empire

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​Pitt Poetry Series, 2014

Nude Descending an Empire develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet engaged with politics, history, ecology and the urgency of the contemporary moment. 

"Once in a while a book appears that seems forged from the truth. This is one."
 —Chase Twichell

"Sam Taylor is a poet to reckon with, a poet to live with, a poet to marvel at. This is a wonderful book."
—Ilya Kaminksy

"Nude Descending an Empire is a stunning book, in all the varied shades of “stun.” ... [W]hen it comes to reciting and composing the psalms of our age, Taylor is the one I want to lead us in prayer." 
  —Khaled Mattawa

Excerpts from
​NUDE DESCENDING AN EMPIRE
​The Book of Endings
America: An Autobiography
The Book of Poetry
Madagascar
Home

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

​Only takes a moment.

​Not one flower of paradise has been hidden from your eyes.

Night tucked inside night. Inside fold inside.

Children behind fluttering curtains asleep. Sound.

The way water over sunlit rocks looks.

All the channels all the time.

The long iris stalk stands upright, its bearded lips in the moonless rain.

You cannot cross you cannot cross back.

Naked, they shot them at dawn 

No, beside the river, tied to tires, set afloat and aflame.​
​
Not one flower of paradise.

New Work, from the Anne Halley Prize Reading, Massachusetts Review

The Book of Endings


Some time while you read this page
or the next one, a species--
like you, with your grandmother,
your dozen eggs, your walk in the park,
a species as vast as your life
and the lives of all your ancestors
chasing bison across Old Europe
or huddled around a fire—will disappear.
A species that has found its own
ways of eating, of moving, of
hiding from predators; a species
that meets itself and makes love
in the bark of a tree or on the leaves
of the canopy or in the humid dirt.
And it has come with us for millions
of years, for millions of years,
it has watched the night
and day follow each other, it has breathed
with the frogs, it has wrapped
the stars around it like a blanket,
a patterned music, a map.
At the beginning of this page
there may have been three or four left,
but now there is only one.
And if you read this page again,
it will be another one, another species,
another story of four billion years
telling itself for the last time.
Wherever life began—a word, a wish
breathed into water, a seed falling
through space—it was all of us
there—as it is now
in this unknown last one.
It has bored into wood, it has carried
water on its back, it has drunk
the dew from its back in the desert,
it has fed its young with strips of
leaves, it has built homes out of bark,
it has carved the sky into a song,
it has spoken in ways no man has heard.
It has emerald wings
it has sapphire wings
it has wings of night
you will never see it
it is already gone

Body of the World

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Ausable Press, 2005
​2006 ForeWord Reviews, Poetry Book of the Year finalist

"One of the most astonishing first books I have encountered in years." 
 —Joseph Stroud

"Simply gorgeous... an almost vertiginous beauty."
—Sarah Maclay

A book of contemporary spirituality that confronts suffering and attempts to reconcile it with a unitary vision of the divine, Body of the World explores the perennial themes of mysticism—of the world as the self—in a variety of new contexts. 

Home page of Sam Taylor, poet
​www.samtaylor.us

email

sam.b.taylor [at] gmail.com
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@samtaylorpoet