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.

R

C

 

The Book of Fools:
​An Essay in Memoir and Verse
Pre-Order Now!
Negative Capability Press, October 14 2021
National Poetry Series Finalist

"a masterwork..." 
—David Keplinger

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

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

At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth—and our plastic-choked ocean—and it is visually, conceptually, and thematically unlike perhaps any book before it. The Book of Fools invents new formal structures to marry global, ecological themes of loss—focused around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—to personal, confessional ones, centered around a mother's early death to cancer. By utilizing innovative lyric techniques within the larger arc of an accessible narrative, the book endeavors to create a contemporary (anti-)epic for a crisis almost beyond the scale of imagination.