To Let the Sun

<p><b>Finalist 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize</b></p> <p>John Allen Taylor's debut poetry collection <i>To Let the Sun</i> opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: take a walk with me . . . I hope you'll come / though I am going anyway. These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma to document the messiness of survival the child's flight from himself and the uncertain path home-to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos fungal gnats and beet seed the speaker reclaims himself: I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives / the fragilities we need to know / we're needed by.</p>