Winner of the Elizabeth P. Braddock Prize, Shelly Taylor’s Lions, Remonstrance is now out from Coconut Books. Taylor is the author of Black-Eyed Heifer, from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Dirt City Lions (Horse Less Press). She is co-editing Hick Poetics, an anthology of rural poetries, with poet Abraham Smith which will be released in the next year.
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