Guilty at the Rapture

by Keith Taylor

Poetry. Fiction. Cultural Writing. Keith Taylor's collection of poems, short stories and creative non-fiction, GUILTY AT THE RAPTURE delights readers with its austere and gentle sensibility. "All things good would rise / into air, pulled from dirt and sky, / from cars left driverless / below, slamming into trees" Taylor coordinates the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan and formerly managed Shaman Drum, a leading independent book store. Author of five poetry chapbooks and a collection of very short stories, LIFE SCIENCE AND OTHER STORIES, his work has appeared in such publications as Story, The Alternative Press, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Witness and HANGING LOOSE.

78 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor]

Forgive me, but while looking for old reviews I had written, I ran across this one John Lofy did of one of my books. It was a lovely little review! And I had forgotten about it

Happily left behind
By John Lofy

The Left Behind series of Christian Apocalypse novels opens with the Rapture, the supposedly promised day when all good people will be taken bodily to heaven before the world faces its last terrible tribulations. The books delight in the slaughter of sinners, and they’re dreck. Keith Taylor’s new collection of poetry is called Guilty at the Rapture, and though it too leads off with the Rapture, it is terrific. Taylor imagines himself left behind by his holier family members, “alone in a world/of smokers, crooks, murderers/. . . alone in a world/without one hope of grace.” He is not just too guilty to make the cut at the Rapture, it seems, but also rapturous to be free from those oppressively good souls.

Taylor, a stalwart pillar of the Ann Arbor writing community (and a regular Observer contributor), has been writing wonderful poems for years. The new book combines older and fresh works, and the result is a vivid, readable collection that is funny, moving, and very alive. Taylor plays all of poetry’s themes. There are nature poems, love poems, and growing-old poems. War lurks at the edges, along with the scars of a violent childhood. But his central preoccupation is redemption. Like a character from Flannery O’Connor, Taylor seems to long for and reject it in equal measure. He knows the world is an imperfect place, and he mourns and celebrates its imperfections by turn. In “As Close As We Will Ever Be,” he speaks to his dying best friend: “You want the miracles back again/and so do I,” but as he helps his friend shave, he admits “I’m afraid of this touch./It’s as close as we will ever be.” The world, and this poem, can break your heart.

But in “Hockey: An Apology,” Taylor remembers bloody, hour-long fights on the ice among “farm kids . . . from cold places.” With a note of gratitude, and of close escape, he concludes “they all became/good fathers and never beat anyone.” That’s the kind of redemption Taylor offers: not heaven, but ordinary goodness in a rough and disappointing world. These poems are gems.



https://annarborobserver.com/articles...