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Marginalia for a Natural History
by Keith Taylor
Price: $9.00
Pages/Poems
ISBN-13: 978-1936873111
Black Lawrence Publishing
326 Bigham Street
Pittsburgh, PA. 15211
To order: http://blacklawrence.com/


About the Book: 

 Marginalia for a Natural History is a sequence of eight-line poems–
written in an invented but rigid, almost unforgiving structure–that
were inspired by the time their author spends talking with and
learning from field biologists. Once he adopted the form, he was able
to find a very real freedom within it that allowed him to write from
science and observation of the natural world, but also from literature
and even from small personal narratives and memories. He likes to imagine
that each of these could have been written as a note in one of the field
guides (or natural histories) he takes with him when he goes out into
wilder places. Some of them actually started that way.


Praise: 

Marginalia for a Natural History is a compilation of ghostly postcards
from paradise. Keith Taylor writes with such exquisite and elliptical
beauty that the real world falls away as you read his poetry, and is
replaced by a world even more real--more vivid, more breathtaking, more
alive for having been captured in his lines. These brief but substantial
lyrics stand strong among the best writing that has taken place in
conversation with nature. They changed the way I see the land and the sky
and the water. This is a chapbook you will return to again and again.
Laura Kasischke


About the Author:   

Over the years Keith Taylor has published some thirteen volumes of poetry,
short fiction, translations, and edited volumes. His most recent full length
collection of poetry was If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University
Press, 2009). Over the last few decades his work has appeared in a couple
hundred journals, magazines, newspapers and on-line sites, here and in Europe,
including The Los Angeles Times, Hanging Loose, The Iowa Review, The Chicago
Tribune, Poetry Ireland Review, The Sunday Telegraph, Pank, The Southern Review,
etc. He has had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
Michigan Council for the Arts. After working at several occupations, some dumb,
some great (like working as a bookseller in Ann Arbor for twenty years), he
settled in to his role as coordinator of the undergraduate writing programs at
the University of Michigan, where he also works as the Director of the Bear River
Writers' Conference and, currently, as the Poetry Editor for Michigan Quarterly
Review



From the Book: 

Hitchhiking and Immortality
by Keith Taylor

I was not paying much attention
in those days but still recognized it
immediately: nightingale song—
full-throated and resonant drifting
out of the woods beside a highway
somewhere in central France, where no cars
slowed in scintillating evening light
and where I thought I might never die.



 


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