"The Book of Fools is a haunting journey into the (under)worlds of personal loss, global inequity, and ecological disaster. Just as the characters and mythic figures in this book cross borders, the poems traverse the aesthetic terrains of lyric and narrative, while also experimenting with typography (erasure, footnotes, strikethrough, greyscale, and more). Taylor brilliantly creates a “composite canvas” to capture what it means to make art in our precarious times and to continue “dancing of our erasure.” —Craig Santos Perez, author of From Unincorporated Territory
Forthcoming in 2020, The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse is a book-length poem that invents new formal structures to marry global, ecological themes of loss—focused around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—to personal, confessional ones. Utilizing experimental 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 the human imagination. The use of self-erasure, as an expression of ecological loss and a vehicle for investigating aesthetic constructions, represents one of several innovations of this collection. Excerpts have been published in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, New Sinews, and OmniVerse.
