Civil Twilight

Civil Twilight Anique Sara Taylor's chapbook Civil Twilight is Winner of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her full-length poetry book Where Space Bends was published May 2020. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work's appeared in Rattle, Common Ground Review, Adanna, Stillwater Review, St. Mark's Poetry Project's: The World, Earth's Daughters, Cover Magazine, The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side among others and widely anthologized. Her first chapbook Poems is published by Unimproved Editions Press. Taylor has co-authored works for HBO, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and a three-act play performed by Playwrights Horizons and Williamstown Playhouse. Her Holocaust poem "The Train" was 2019 finalist in Charter Oak's Award for Best Historical Poem. Where Space Bends in earlier chapbook form was chosen Finalist by both Minerva Rising and Blue Light Press in 2014 Chapbook Competitions. In 2015 Under the Ice Moon was chosen Finalist by Blue Light Press. Civil Twilight is a stunningly crafted sequence of small poems that deliver both an architecture and music reminiscent of the stanza. Here, the reader will enter room after room of discovery to encounter "the perfume of his cherry tobacco," or see "earthmites teethe shark-like through/ particles of sand." These poems, like little vestibules, exist between those moments that illuminate the inner life. They exist between daylight and darkness, past and present, between the living and the dead, and between a daughter and the memory of a father. Taylor's poems are keenly attuned to the language of the natural world and to all the mysteries that come with it. - Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate Anique Sara Taylor's award-winning collection is mesmerizing. Thirty poems, thirty words each, shimmer with a refined intensity at once both taut and expansive. Within this tight form, her emotional richness is as lyric as it is restrained. Grief's shadow, loss-yet love of the stubborn, simple glories of existence, emerge as gifts of her inner iconography. These resonate with Taylor's organic allusions to the natural world, her outer landscape. Starfish, eagles, crickets, thunderstorms, a sycamore tree-all conspirators in her survival story. "Half daughter, half swallow," she writes, "if only I could tie down the corners of the air." In Civil Twilight, she has done just that. - Leslie T. Sharpe, Author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills