NUDE DESCENDING AN EMPIRE

Buy

​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. The book is one of the first to grapple with climate change in poems like "Home," "Madagascar," "America: An Autobiography," and "The Book of Endings." 

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

"The voice here works at so many dimensions: spiritual, political, erotic, sensually worldly and quietly lyrical—and probably a dozen more! Few poets are able to write well in just one or two of these realms... I love the many lives of this book: his life as Sioux, Jew, a Christian peasant, and many others. I love how he curses and praises and sexes in the same poem, often in the same moment."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

The Book of Endings
America: An Autobiography
The Book of Poetry
Madagascar
Home

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

​Available from Amazon,
​the University of Pittsburgh Press,
or from the author below:

Buy Now

excerpts
interview at the Best American Poetry Blog.   
Press:
​LA Review of Books
Poetry International
​PBS NewsHour

Praise

"Sam Taylor’s Nude Descending an Empire is a book that has large ambitions—and overwhelmingly succeeds at all of them. The voice here works at so many dimensions: spiritual, political, erotic, sensually worldly and quietly lyrical—and probably a dozen more! Few poets are able to write well in just one or two of these realms. That Taylor can do so much—he marries Frank O’Hara and Merwin, Whitman and Dante, your latest local radio report and science fiction!—is amazing in and of itself. And, then, when you take a breath and sit down hard reading this book, his gift at incantatory syntax takes this amazement to a wholly different level—you stand up, you read these poems aloud. I love the many lives of this book: his life as Sioux, Jew, a Christian peasant, and many others. I love how he curses and praises and sexes in the same poem, often in the same moment. Sam Taylor is a poet to reckon with, a poet to live with, a poet to marvel at. This is a wonderful book."
                     —Ilya Kaminsky

"Once in a while a book appears that seems forged from the truth. This is one. The poems entirely bypass the Adventures of Self so common in contemporary poetry. They take head-on the end of nature, for one thing, and the significance of human life in a world changing so perilously fast that it’s barely recognizable from one moment to the next. In order to do this, a poet must forego all kinds of vanities and impersonations and write unlovely language in a voice that is itself a musical instrument. More than a few poems made me wish I’d written them.
                    —Chase Twichell

"Nude Descending an Empire is a stunning book, in all the varied shades of “stun.” The nude descending an empire enacts an apocalyptic prophecy where the earth’s inhabitants are scampering about barefoot and naked sheltering in the shades of the towers they had competed to build. But Sam Taylor is too astute a poet to only horrify us with the facts, with the impending damage. His voice is elegiac for all of us, for life on this planet, and his ironic sleights of hands point to the end of irony, apathy, or whatever we call the unconscionable ways that have sustained our consumption and violence. Indeed, the poet implicates himself first with wrenching and moving self-indictments, but when it comes to reciting and composing the psalms of our age, Taylor is the one I want to lead us in prayer." 
                    —Khaled Mattawa

"Sam Taylor’s poems make me shudder at the horror and pleasure of this world. In the face of the American imperial project, the poems sing every song imaginable – dirge, praise song, ecstatic chant. The antidote to despair, then, is more – more of the body, heart, more mystery, fear. “Don’t say impossible,” says the poet, and these hurting, gorgeous poems never do."
                   —Sarah Browning, Director of Split This Rock

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.

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)

JATAKA TALES

From my life as a Christian peasant
I cross my forehead and chest solemnly after kneeling.
From my life as a Sioux, “All my relations.”
From my life as a Jew, I curse God in the daylight,
then steal back at night to kneel in the moon.
From my life as dust, I call all things father
and no place home.  From my life as water,
I can rest only in the lowliest places.
From my life as a traveling salesman,
I can’t stop talking or dreaming of maps,
but from my life as a stone, I have yet to speak.
From my life as a Russian streetsweeper
I eye women carrying bags of groceries
with suspicion.  From my life as a clergyman,
all the tears of a body, more than the sea.
From my last life as rain, this endless longing
for the roots of the earth and a woman’s shadow.
And, again, from my life as dust, this muted yes,
this meaningless assent to all things.