Description
The 2022 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest Winner’s collection is BONE WISHING by Tara Flint Taylor.
Tara Flint Taylor’s Bone Wishing names the shapes of grief: “a dark umbrella shaken / after hard rain,” an “iron anchor on the desert floor, the “empty pot on the stove tinged pink.” Then, with nothing but the gritty clarity of her eye and voice, Taylor goes about the hard work of «mak[ing] some makeshift / shelter for [the] self.» From the ruins emerges the indelible shelter of this profound and deeply felt collection.
—Linda Tomol Pennisi, author of The Burning Boat
Elegiacal, these poems ride on their images: salt water, sea glass, blood- red borscht. I admire their diction and shifting focus, though the speaker remains haunted throughout by a sister’s illness and the sorrow of loss. She looks back through the shadows of memory, past piles of broken china and “ruinous light,” through the undersea sediment of thousand-year-old plants into the eyes of her younger self, which are filled with wonder and grief at “the shock of ordinary things.” This is a fine first collection.
—Joseph Millar, author of Dark Harvest, New and Selected Poems
Tara Flint Taylor’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. Tara is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint.
