Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST! LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 26th, 2023) featuring the wonderful poet, writer and visual artist, Anique Sara Taylor who reads from and talks about her new, award-winning Chapbook Civil Twilight. Pamela ManchĂ© Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large is also on the show, bringing us her unique insights into poetry and poets.Â
Anique Sara Taylor’s chapbook Civil Twilight won the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her full-length poetry book Where Space Bends was published in May 2020 by Finishing Line Press. Anique’s other chapbooks include When Black Opalescent Birds Still Circled the Globe, chosen Finalist by Harbor Review’s Inaugural 2023 Jewish Women’s Prize; Feathered Strips of Prayer Before Morning, chosen Finalist by Minerva Rising Chapbook Competition 2023 and Cobblestone Mist, Longlisted Finalist for the 2023 Harbor Editions’ Marginalia Series. Her Holocaust poem “The Train” was a 2019 Charter Oak Award Finalist for Best Historical Poem. https://aniquesarataylor.com
Anique Sara Taylor's award-winning collection is mesmerizing. Thirty poems, thirty words each, shimmer with a refined intensity at once both taut and expansive. Within this tight form, her emotional richness is as lyric as it is restrained. Grief's shadow, loss-yet love of the stubborn, simple glories of existence, emerge as gifts of her inner iconography. These resonate with Taylor's organic allusions to the natural world, her outer landscape. Starfish, eagles, crickets, thunderstorms, a sycamore tree-all conspirators in her survival story. "Half daughter, half swallow," she writes, "if only I could tie down the corners of the air." In Civil Twilight, she has done just that.- Leslie T. Sharpe, Author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills
 …these brief poems filled, line by line, with such rich diction. [Her] formal gestures--30 words, five lines--keep the poems taut, & with stresses, the insistent spondees throughout, emphasize the emotional resonance underlying the book: shy mouth nailed shut / sheets creased white / cockroach shells / quill-shaped mist / bones break naked / beaks crave rain / …so many lovely phrasings, all toward expressing & containing the undercurrent of grief. "Bittersweet," [she] says, yes. - Michael Waters, innerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020)
 Civil Twilight is a stunningly crafted sequence of small poems that deliver both an architecture and music reminiscent of the stanza. Here, the reader…enters room after room of discovery…These poems, like little vestibules, exist between…moments that illuminate the inner life…between daylight and darkness, past and present, between the living and the dead, between a daughter and the memory of a father. Taylor's poems are keenly attuned to the language of the natural world and to all the mysteries that come with it. - Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate
