BSE's forthcoming title, variations in the dream of X is a meta-theatrical project — a play within a play within poems. Preorder now!
Ken Taylor is the author of four books of poetry, 3 plays, and a collaboration with Ed Roberson titled found poem(s), a book of photography (Ken's) and poetry (Ed's) forthcoming from Corbett vs. Dempsey. He is the founder and editor of selva oscura press.
variations in the dream of X
Ken Taylor’s panegyric variations in dream of X riffs and morphs on a poets theater where, as in Gertrude Stein’s plays, anything can be a character and talk with anything else and language is the star. Here allegory animalia meets gender theory meets erudite dudes in a doughnut shop singing “many songs consigned to one mouth.” Super fun to read aloud!
X marks the spot. X dreams in poetry, some of the most jagged, gorgeous, elliptical lyric verse you’re likely to meet between North Carolina and Chicago, laid out in rising and falling action that swaddles or cocoons a play—a dream-play, some mutant variation of poet’s theater, where bros Chet and Jeffrey hang out in a donut shop and strategize how to hit on a check-out girl at the local grocery. But this isn’t Mamet, or even Beckett: it’s X’s dream, where a polyphony of voices upturn and query and queer all the categories—class and classiness, race and species, gender and genre. Ken Taylor’s variations in the dream of X is utterly unclassifiable, eccentric and central, hilarious and heartstoppingly beautiful.