Body of the World

<p><i>Body of the World</i> Sam Taylor's first book is the work of a poet whose sense of what it means to be human is inseparable from the physical world about which he writes with unnerving intimacy. The voice while grounded in the familiar landscape of twenty-first-century America is also transparent. It regards itself as integral to that place in time so that to speak of the human mind and body is to speak of the world just as perception of the world becomes perception of the physical and mental self: not <i>him</i>self but the human self. Thus his subject is the enduring mystery of consciousness in all its embodiments: memory the rain a credit card death an air conditioner the scent of eucalyptus. His language is like granite a substance unto itself yet at home in the flux. As we enter what the poet has called elsewhere “a global age of distance-less information and virtual experience” <i>Body of the World </i>is a necessary book.</p><p><i>Oh the body in its bedouin sleep. Always awake<br> always walking blocks of city scaffolding<br> always wrapped in rain hot cocoa cinnamon.<br> Always a curled embryo always a curved umbrella<br> always the handle of an unknown suitcase<br> always the echo that will not fit<br> inside a cathedral. Always a brief April.</i></p><p>A graduate of Swarthmore College and a former Michener Fellow in the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin <b>Sam Taylor </b>is a poet nonfiction writer and yoga teacher. His poems have appeared in numerous publications and received <i>The Florida Review </i>Editor's Award in Poetry in 2002. He splits his time between teaching English at The University of New Mexico-Taos and as a caretaker for a wilderness refuge in the San Juan Mountains during its snowed-in winter months.</p>