The high-speed phantasmagoria that is 57 wyomings soars aloft in an audioscape of dictions—noirish deadpan, cowboy professor, surrealist graffiti, hermeneutical slang, and lonely late-night radio preaching—to burn the air with its ceaseless invention. Ken Taylor’s prose poems seem composed not so much of discreet words and images, but rather of charged particles that coalesce and burst over and over, moving beyond “belt stars. anomaly patterns. profane exempla,” to end up “rummaging for the real mccoy.” The narrator repeatedly evokes the movie-made old West—“I can take a punch. stage high falls. wagon wrecks. I know appaloosas”—with a granular specificity that sustains an ongoing tension between actual falsity and the mere appearance of falsity. The conundrum undergirds imagery that arrests the ear before the mind can begin to catch the paradox. These are poems to chant aloud, to sing in “the wolf tones of detuned strings.” -Albert Mobilio
The high-speed phantasmagoria that is 57 wyomings soars aloft in an audioscape of dictions—noirish deadpan, cowboy professor, surrealist graffiti, hermeneutical slang, and lonely late-night radio preaching—to burn the air with its ceaseless invention. Ken Taylor’s prose poems seem composed not so much of discreet words and images, but rather of charged particles that coalesce and burst over and over, moving beyond “belt stars. anomaly patterns. profane exempla,” to end up “rummaging for the real mccoy.” The narrator repeatedly evokes the movie-made old West—“I can take a punch. stage high falls. wagon wrecks. I know appaloosas”—with a granular specificity that sustains an ongoing tension between actual falsity and the mere appearance of falsity. The conundrum undergirds imagery that arrests the ear before the mind can begin to catch the paradox. These are poems to chant aloud, to sing in “the wolf tones of detuned strings.” -Albert Mobilio
Ken Taylor is the author of seven published work and three plays. Most recently, found poem(s), with Ed Roberson (Ken's photos, Ed's poems0 from Corbett vs. Dempsey. He is the founder and publisher of selva oscura press.
