Sam Taylor


“Sam Taylor’s Nude Descending an Empire is a book that haslarge ambitions—and overwhelmingly succeeds at all of them. The voicehere works at so many dimensions: spiritual, political, erotic,sensually worldly and quietly lyrical—and probably a dozen more! Fewpoets are able to write well in just one or two of these realms. ThatTaylor can do so much—he marries Frank O’Hara and Merwin, Whitmanand Dante, your latest local radio report and science fiction!—isamazing in and of itself. And, then, when you take a breath and sit downhard reading this book, his gift at incantatory syntax takes thisamazement to a wholly different level—you stand up, you read these poemsaloud. I love the many lives of this book: his life as Sioux, Jew, aChristian peasant, and many others. I love how he curses and praises andsexes in the same poem, often in the same moment. Sam Taylor is a poetto reckon with, a poet to live with, a poet to marvel at. This is awonderful book.”



“Sam Taylor’s language is spare, urgent, and decorated only bythe essential. The result is poems that feel almost timeless, as if theycould have been written in any century: past, present, or future. Hisengagement with his subjects is emotionally, intellectually,imaginatively, and linguistically profound. Once in a while a bookappears that seems forged from the truth. This is one. The poemsentirely bypass the Adventures of Self so common in contemporary poetry.They take head-on the end of nature, for one thing, and the significanceof human life in a world changing so perilously fast that it’sbarely recognizable from one moment to the next. In order to do this, apoet must forego all kinds of vanities and impersonations and writeunlovely language in a voice that is itself a musical instrument. Morethan a few poems made me wish I’d written them.”



“Nude Descending an Empire is a stunning book, in all the variedshades of “stun.” The nude descending an empire enacts an apocalypticprophecy where the earth’s inhabitants are scampering aboutbarefoot and naked sheltering in the shades of the towers they hadcompeted to build. But Sam Taylor is too astute a poet to only horrifyus with the facts, with the impending damage. His voice is elegiac forall of us, for life on this planet, and his ironic sleights of handspoint to the end of irony, apathy, or whatever we call theunconscionable ways that have sustained our consumption and violence.Indeed, the poet implicates himself first with wrenching and movingself-indictments, but when it comes to reciting and composing the psalmsof our age, Taylor is the one I want to lead us in prayer.”



“It’s wonderful enough that Nude Descending an Empire is sobountifully true to the implications in both halves of its title: theembodied, erotic, intimate, naked self of the first half; and thepublic, political, historical, global-minded sensibility of the secondhalf. But that’s merely to admit the reach and mix of subject matter. Equally wonderful is the language here, as it wanders from reflective todeclamatory, from mallspeak to the feel of ancient wisdom literature,from rambunctiously comic to quietly philosophical…all of it somehowfitting together into something very much its own, the samtaylorese thatawaits you in this fine, engaging—and important—collection.”



“Sam Taylor’s poems make me shudder at the horror and pleasureof this world. In the face of the American imperial project, the poemssing every song imaginable — dirge, praise song, ecstatic chant. Theantidote to despair, then, is more —more of the body, heart, moremystery, fear. ‘Don’t say impossible,’ says the poet, and thesehurting, gorgeous poems never do.””