Customer Reviews

Curios: Poems

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Believe the blurbs and promo copy on this book. Judith Taylor has pulled off a marvelously original collection of poems that are simultaneously eerie, witty, and profound. And she succeeds in spite of following none of the usual poetry workshop precepts: there's no sense of place, no meter, none of the usual topics. Each poem is written in seven or eight lines, each end-stopped, and the effect is dramatic. Thank you Sarabande Books for defying convention and publishing this work.

Judith Taylor's poems are funny, scary, and startling both because of the emotion they reveal and the language they are woven from. The women of Curios transcend limitation even when they still think they're surrounded by it, and in showing this Taylor allows her readers to transcend limitation too.

Taylor's work is a canny combination of candor and deceptions, illusions, allusions and assertions deftly rendered into short poems that take up much more space in the world than one might think from looking at them. For the most part, she effaces narrative: "I believe in plot, my dear, only when it suits me." She provides both the words and the gaps. Lacunae are not seconds for the reader to breathe, but absences that become part of each poem's strange logic. She devises and assembles details that immediately become the crux, liminal fringe that becomes the essence of a situation. You'll hear echoes of Louise Bogan and James Tate, of humor and bewilderment, weariness, acceptance and defiance. There is beauty in both the vehicle and subject of these poems. In the absence of ligature is a study of loss and desire. As you read, the lines that you will start to memorize add up: "I can't stop computing the long division of my sadness" and "In time, the world begins to shape your stubbourn mind." The pleasures and provocations of this poetry are bountiful.