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SAM TAYLOR
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  • [Books]
    • The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse
    • Nude Descending an Empire
    • Body of the World
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The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse




​

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 other book. 
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A National Poetry Series finalist, 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.


The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse

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NEW BOOK: Limited First Edition

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

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Negative Capability Press, 2021

Bookshop
Amazon
Reviews
> Z.L. Nickels in Colorado Review
>  Catherine Imbriglio in Poetry International
> 
 
Camille Dungy in Orion Magazine
> Patrick Thomas Henry in Heavy Feather Review

​>  Lisa Low in ​Tupelo Quarterly
​
​>  Amy Penne in ​Green Mountains Review

Interviews
w/ Esteban Rodriguez in EcoTheo Review
w/ Kristina Marie Darling in Tupelo Quarterly

w/ Tiffany Troy  in Matter Monthly

Excerpted Texts
​First Taxi
​Friend

Orpheus at OmniVerse
five poems at New Sinews
Tupelo Quarterly: The Book of Fools, section 1
Vice-Versa: Fools' Guide to the Underworld
"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 typographical innovation. 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 
Unincorporated Territory 

"[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.
"With The Book of Fools, Sam Taylor has introduced a truly new and absolutely necessary disturbance into the field. All too often, memory and memoir serve as a baroque means of concealment; here, there is very purest disclosure...and by that I mean disclosure at the molecular level. In Taylor's ravishing text, the atoms of every image are seen to shiver and to shimmer. It is as though Taylor knows exactly what is at stake in the gamble of utterance. The Book of Fools is thrilling to witness and believe."
—Donald Revell
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Order Now
Reviews
> "How to Erase One's Descent"
​Review by Z.L. Nickels in Colorado Review

> "Broken Hearts and a Broken Earth"
Review by Catherine Imbriglio in 
Poetry International
> 
"Fifteen Poetry Recommendations for Our Darkest Nights" by Camille Dungy in Orion Magazine
>“Plastic Ecologies, Plastic Lives”
Review by Patrick Thomas Henry in Heavy Feather Review

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

>"Prose Is What We Add to Myth: Sam Taylor's Book of Fools" in Green Mountains Review

Interviews
"An Interview with Sam Taylor"
w/ Esteban Rodriguez in EcoTheo Review

"
A Conversation with Sam Taylor about Poetry, Hybridity, and Erasure"
w/ Kristina Marie Darling in Tupelo Quarterly

​
"Dancing on the Grave of the Fucked World"

w/ Tiffany Troy  in Matter Monthly
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. A National Poetry Series finalist, 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. Faced with the question of how to express the enormous ecological loss of our time, Sam Taylor joins this collective loss to a personal story of loss involving a mother’s early death to cancer, a story which culminates in a scene the speaker is compelled to revisit, relive, and revise. 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.

​"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 typographical innovation. 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 Unincorporated Territory 


"With The Book of Fools, Sam Taylor has introduced a truly new and absolutely necessary disturbance into the field. All too often, memory and memoir serve as a baroque means of concealment; here, there is very purest disclosure...and by that I mean disclosure at the molecular level. In Taylor's ravishing text, the atoms of every image are seen to shiver and to shimmer. It is as though Taylor knows exactly what is at stake in the gamble of utterance. The Book of Fools is thrilling to witness and believe."
—Donald Revell

"Sam Taylor's new book is a masterwork: a modern epic that drives toward our planetary grief with exhilarating invention and 'a plastic Byzantium' that invokes everything from the Pacific Plastic Gyre to Orpheus in a clam bar, from border crossings of ‘illegal’ people to Picasso, Matisse, Dylan, and Isadora Duncan. Yet, at its heart is one story, the story of the good son and the lost mother—or, is it the lost son and the good mother? The story is spun back so many times that with each rendering different figures seem to emerge as the book erases and revises itself before our eyes. This self-erasure has something to do with loss and something to do with healing and retrieval, but eventually we realize that the deeply personal story, shocking sometimes in its candor, is told less for its own sake than as a figure for our shared experience and as a study of reality, trauma, art, and myth. This is Taylor at the height of his game, and these poems, meaningfully bursting out of their own language, are a brilliant display of his powers."
—David Keplinger, author of The World to Come


"Sam Taylor’s gorgeous new book lets the tensions of story and lyric unspool and weave, sink and surface, erase and reveal themselves. Taylor’s numerous formal strategies in THE BOOK OF FOOLS resist a single reading, and each reentry reveals more secrets inside the plasticity of both language and memory. Recursive, archetypal and heartbreaking, this book takes you through the subterranean realms of grief to rescue bright moments of intimacy and love among the shipwreck of familial history. Taylor writes: “prose is what we add to myth” but myth is also what he disentangles, investigates, and introduces us all to the many ways of knowing if we listen more deeply."
—Traci Brimhall
​


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  • [Books]
    • The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse
    • Nude Descending an Empire
    • Body of the World
  • [Poems]
  • [About]
  • [contact]