Abraham Smith and Shelly Taylor, Editors
Publisher: Lost Roads Publishers
Pub Date: 3/16/2015
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. HICK POETICS is an anthology of contemporary American poets connected to rural landscapes. In addition to poems this book includes short essays by a wide variety of established and emerging writers including Michael Earl Craig, Juliana Sphar, G.C.Waldrep and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge to name a few. There is no other assemblage of rural voices this broad; there is no other collection so fully exploring and celebrating Nowhere, USA.
Abraham Smith has published three full-length poetry collections. Smith is the recipient of grants and fellowships from University of Wisconsin, University of Alabama, Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA. His experience as an educator, writer, performer, and community arts organizer has provided him with invaluable insight into the writings of America.
Shelly Taylor's first book, BLACK-EYED HEIFER (Tarpaulin Sky Press), was listed as one of the top 30 poetry books of 2010 by Coldfront Magazine. This collection is a tribute to the South, the land and horses, the oral tradition, and her upbringing. Her second collection, LIONS, REMONSTRANCE, is out now from Coconut Books; it too is situated in the Southern Gothic etiquette.
Publisher: Coconut Books
Pub Date: 3/31/2014
ISBN: 9781938055133
"Shelly Taylor's LIONS, REMONSTRANCE is full of lovely, lilting surprises, tragic transformations, words that explode and strike. There are watercolor mothers, the I as slippage, radical home-makings and unmakings, dizzied memories that tighten and then unravel. Deeper and closer: Taylor's book cuts open and makes radically new the war poem. It is a cut and spliced enterprise, resonant of felt omissions, imagistic and lyric by turns, vibrant and spinning: its core is deeply affecting." —Jenny Boully
"Shelly Taylor writes soberly about human matters without the gimmickry or exhibitionism which typifies our age. I proclaim that no poet of this generation impresses me as much as she and if the prize committees are listening and worthy of their name this exquisite book, LIONS, REMONSTRANCE, will sweep the boards. I read this poet with humble awe." —Gordon Massman
"In LIONS, REMONSTRANCE we read: everywhere you are, there I'll be. These poems are a sustained accompaniment, a presence rendered from the guts of compassion, and, as an alternative to abandonment, they instruct how to love, without flinching, the one hollowed into shapes of vacancy, the shapeless shapes of war. The syntactical logic in these poems casts a brilliant constellation inside an endless grief. Shelly Taylor's work reminds us that the love inside the lamentation is radical, political, visionary." —Selah Saterstrom
Pub Date: 5/1/2010
ISBN: 9780982541647
“There’s a fine density and intensity to this work, the ‘thinginess’ that informs our actual lives, and a radically innovative use of language. I kept thinking of the alabaster bear and petrified whale vertebrae on our mantle, these fabulous memories of life.” —Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and Dalva
“The prose poems of Shelly Taylor’s first collection create stories that poke through your eye & go straight through your head. Ms. Taylor makes up words in ‘holler time,’ language you haven’t heard before but know, right away, to be urgent. I can tell you that she ‘put me ripened there,’ into a three-dimensional South of horses, fields, and characters. Her poems are hell-bent, mad-cap adventures whose diction & syntax defy category.” —Jane Miller
"BLACK-EYED HEIFER is a mighty anthem to down home local culture—the deeply rooted—the feisty, sustaining rhythm that saturates the land. These lyrical prose poems sing a 'rampant fire' tune 'to yesterday's hands-up hinterland' and the fact that 'there were horses, there always are.' There is abundant vitality and wide-eyed beauty in Shelly Taylor's contemporary Georgian eclogues, 'all the while mindful of the color turn' and 'silent footwork & news.'" —Brenda Iijima
chapbooks:
dancing girl press, 2009
