The World Underneath
Richard Tayson
9781631010699
76 pages
The Kent State University Press
Overview
An intimate second book of poemsRichard Tayson's second book of poems, The World Underneath, concerns birth, motherhood, explorations of the feminine in a world scarred by war, environmental crisis, and violence. The book's locus is a series of poems related to a home birth, an event that leads the poems' speaker to question the place of the individual within the home, the world, and the wider universe. All things connect, as the speaker travels cross-country to the birth then back to where he lives in a multiracial relationship of two men committed to each another. The book's widest aim is to unite the personal and the universal, the masculine and the feminine, the gay and the non-gay. As they explore the crucial dilemmas of our time, Tayson's poems probe beneath ordinary experience to discover the ineffable and the difficult-to-say, the space between what we know and what remains distant, unreachable.
Author Bio
Richard Tayson’s first book of poetry, The Apprentice of Fever (Kent State University Press, 1998), was the 1997 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize winner. Tayson’s other awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Prairie Schooner’s Edward Stanley Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Tayson’s co-authored book of non-fiction, Look Up for Yes (1998), appeared on bestseller lists in Germany, and has been included in Reader’s Digest’s Today’s Best Nonfiction in the United States, Germany and Australia. He lives in Queens, New York.
