In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”
Strangers
About the author
Rob Taylor
Rob Taylor is the author of Strangers (Biblioasis, 2021) and three other poetry collections. He is also the editor of What The Poets Are Doing: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood Editions, 2018), and the guest editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2019 (Biblioasis, 2019). He lives in Port Moody, BC, on the unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-waututh) peoples, and teaches Creative Writing at Simon Fraser University.
by