Anique Sara Taylor - Where Space Bends

LISTEN to my 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with poet and award-winning artist Anique Sara Taylor on her splendidly lyric debut poetry collection, Where Space Bends (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

Anique Sara Taylor is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Common Ground Review, Adanna, St. Mark’s Poetry Project’s The World, Stillwater Review, Earth’s Daughters and several anthologies. She’s co-authored works for HBO, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster and a three-act play that was performed by Playwrights Horizons and Williamstown Theatre Festival. Where Space Bends, in earlier chapbook forms, was chosen chapbook finalist by Minerva Rising (2014, 2015) and Blue Light Press (2014). An award-winning artist, Taylor’s art has been featured in numerous galleries including The Bruce Museum, CT, The Monmouth Museum, NJ, The Noyes Museum, NJ, The Puffin Foundation, NJ, The Cork Gallery at Avery Fisher Hall, NYC, The Bronfman Center Gallery, NYC. She teaches Creative Writing for Benedictine

Hospital’s Oncology Support Program, Bard LLI , Writers in the Mountains and also teaches privately. She holds a Poetry MFA (Drew University), Diplôme (The Sorbonne), a Drawing MFA and Painting BFA (Pratt Institute) and a Master of Divinity Degree.

“Anique Sara Taylor’s fierce wind-whipped poems pull me, drag me, shake me and make me see – seasons, oceans, stars, buds set to burst and “the universe of a single cell.” They make me feel – the joy of a deer tick tunneling in, “the wound of a new poem,” my own “nerves of scraped glass.” She has the gift of reminding us we are alive in all our senses, and then beyond our senses, far beyond, into prayer and into the void. “Abandoning all illusion of safety,” it is “today again.” - Alicia Ostriker