What We Keep Within the Living

The poems of Julie Taylor burn indelibly on the retina of the soul-you can't but see and feel their fire long after the page has been turned, the book put down. From the wonders of the natural world, it's rhythms, beauties, deaths; to the heat of bodies in desire and the death of her partner by fire; and the shards of grief held in fragments of the body, Taylor shows us, poem after poem, in rich spare language (like the loam of earth) how what breaks regenerates and "how flesh and fire are human."

-Alison Granucci



In What We Keep Within The Living, Julie Taylor brings us a clear poetic voice that speaks a ravishingly lush language of precise emotion. We enter her story "Remembering Roses" in which she momentarily dwells on a tattoo on her deceased lover's shoulder. In a deft turn, now in a rose garden, reaching for the transcendent, she sees "how ants decorate the dead." Or later, in a poem that makes clear her lover died in a fire, she ends with, "burns these words and this song,/ the rooster crowing another dawn." Such turns of hope and optimism populate this book that breathes with life, breathes life into mourning, and language into life.

-Owen Lewis



Trauma and beauty, love and horror have been the subject of great poetry since the early Greeks. Julie Taylor raises it out of myth into reality transforming the line, the image and the general thrust of this book into great art. Who is this poet and why haven't we heard from her before? A useless question, if there ever was one. She's here now and it's not going to stop. This well is deep; this art is fully mature. Expect more!

-Fran Quinn