Books
I would love to send you a signed copy of B-Side Girls! Please get in touch: shellyjtaylor@gmail.com.
B-SIDE GIRLS KNOCKIN’ SUGAR IN THE GOURD (The Magnificent Field, 2021)
"B-SIDE GIRLS KNOCKIN' SUGAR IN THE GOURD is total commotion. Shelly Taylor introduces an ontological vision of southern feminist sociality where girl power is fully operative in every gesture, every utterance. Pitch perfect and vivacious, the pulse of place and space somewhere between Sodom & Loudiwici is 'the whole underearth reverberating faultline.' Headstrong and energized, here is an anthem that sings the gorgeousness of specificity, marking phenomena and sensation with each breath. As delicate and fleeting as the morning dew and as powerful as the sun's rays, these poems radiate the wonder and delectation of existence."—Brenda Iijima
NOTES FROM BYZANTIUM (Black Rock Press, 2019)
A hybrid visual/poetic edition that combines Shelly Taylor’s intense, language-driven investigations into place and identity with the erosional utterances of Eben Goff’s entropic and elegant oil engravings in wax panels. 7”x9”x.25” Edition 250
HICK POETICS (edited by Shelly Taylor and Abraham Smith, Lost Roads Press, 2015)
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.
Poetry. "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
Horseless Press chapbook, 2012
A mosaic of form and language, childhood and adulthood, the American South, horses, gravel roads, and light. It is a riptide pulling its readers out into the deep, powerful currents of nostalgia. It is unrelenting. (Dane Hamann, TriQuarterly) 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) Shelly Taylor’s first collection Black-Eyed Heifer inhabits the possibilities of language, indigenous in its diction, but radically unfamiliar in its jagged syntax and extended lines. This is neither an experimental or pastoral poetry, but a fusion of speech and intellect that reflect a poet who is deeply rooted in the earth, its dirt and concrete, its horses and cats, but speaks in a rhythm that explodes into space, taps into the pacing of a 21st century phantasmagoric, recollected, American landscape and self. If you made Robert Creeley write lines the length of Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon says I love you, gave them both the sensibility and precise diction of a contemporary Emily Dickinson riding on a horse fast enough to get from Athens to Brooklyn in 10 minutes, then you’d get something like Taylor’s poems. The pacing is high octane, pyrotechnic, but the discursive function of the content is old school, familiar, and impressively defiant. (Jake Levine, Sonora Review) 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) 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) Reminiscent of Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride, Taylor’s poems evoke the quotidian without becoming banal, carrying the reader through dreamlike forests and fields. . . . Whether eclogue, pastoral, or idyll, Shelly Taylor’s poems turn her audience’s attention to a new poetics of place and carve out a marvelously hybridized space in contemporary American poetry. (Eric Weinstein, Prick of the Spindle)
Dancing Girl Press chapbook, 2009
Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs chapbook, 2008