A limited number of first edition hardback copies of Taylor’s latest book are now available. Published by Quercus Review Press. Cover art by Jordi Camps. Interior design by Sally Gerbo.

Taylor Mali has grown up and settled down, and the proof can be found in Late Father and Other Poems. Parenthood and partnership dwell in these poems in addition to a “tender gloom” that comes from having lost a father years before finally becoming one, a late father. Mali’s signature playful eloquence and poignant observations are still at work here, but in these poems, “all the smallest parts of me . . . can let down their tiny burdens all at once” (“My Sister Asks if She Can See More Grey”), and a wiser, more magnanimous voice emerges, a father’s voice, gently offering up a new invocation:

O, lightning, if you’re listening, disregard
my former invocations. And rain, please bless
my simple little poems; they’re plenty hard
to write, and the world needs them no less.

Let my family if not my other works outlive me.
And to those who have survived the storm, forgive me.

(from “Sonnet on My Former Invocations”)