The Book of Fools

Book excerpt: At once poem, essay, memoir fragment, and art object, The Book of Fools is a sweeping elegy for our earth-and our plastic-choked ocean. Faced with the question of how to express the enormous ecological loss of our time, poet Sam Taylor marries this collective loss to a personal story of loss involving childhood, memory, and a mother's early death to cancer, a story which culminates in a scene the speaker is compelled to revisit, relive, and revise. Along the way, the poet's experiments in a poetics of "self-erasure" create a polyphonic reading experience, enrich the book's journey into the underworld, and deepen its investigation into nonfiction, myth, and aesthetics. Weaving together a diversity of themes, styles and lyric innovation, The Book of Fools challenges and refreshes our notions of what a poem can look like and what it can accomplish.