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Sam Taylor's first book of poems, Body of the World, was published by Ausable Press in 2005 and was a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Poetry Book of the Year Award. The book primarily explores themes of mysticism--of the world as the self--in a variety of contemporary contexts. |
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Reviews
"Sam Taylor’s Body of the World is one of the most astonishing first books I have encountered in years. I know of no other American poet quite like him. Body of the World has much of the freshness, imaginative surprise, abundance, and linguistic energy of Rimbaud’s Le Bâteau Ivre. But Taylor is not a post-Symbolist poet. Nor does he write in the descriptive / discursive / reflective mode that comprises so much of the current American praxis. His poems read like the quantum theory funneled through language where the processes that make up a moment of experience combust in a transference or transformation of energy. His poems enact, they do not simply describe or reflect (we are worlds away from Wordsworthian moments recollected in tranquility). Modern physics tells us that every bush is in fact a burning bush, a molecular blaze. One could say the same for Sam Taylor’s poems. And what holds their fire together is his hard wrought, exacting craft. The poems in Body of the World are strange, haunting anthems of our mortal world. I read them with pleasure and with wonder."
-- Joseph Stroud
—Joseph Stroud
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