ABOUT THIS BOOK

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

John Allen Taylor’s debut poetry collection To Let the Sun opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: “take a walk with me . . . I hope you’ll come / though I am going anyway.” These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child’s flight from himself, and the uncertain path home—to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: “I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we’re needed by.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Allen Taylor lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is the author of Unmonstrous, and his work has appeared in Booth, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He directs the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and coordinates the Writing Center at University of Michigan-Dearborn.

REVIEWS

“In the thick of grief before the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for a gardener and asks where he has taken the body of Christ. Only when he calls her by her name does she see him. In John Allen Taylor’s To Let the Sun, the body is the empty tomb, the garden, the gardener, and the names that return us to ourselves. In this Edenic reversal, Taylor calls back the animals, undoes the spell of flesh, and reclaims the garden ruined long ago. The poems in To Let the Sun invoke new world orders, even as Taylor asks, ‘Oh Lord is faith / fury // or a bouquet of poppies / left to rot // on the windowsill?’ The poems, like traumatic memory, riot and distort, name and unname. A dazzling debut.”
—Natalie Eilbert, author of Overland

“Abuse, a child’s suffering—years of silencing and shuttered pain; in these poems we witness the speaker’s tormented journey to feel, to live, to find his home; at the same time, we see with this poet’s utterly clear eyes nature’s literalness and wonder. To Let the Sun is deeply meaningful of the speaker’s personal will and this poet’s exceptional accomplishment.”
—Laurie Lamon, author of Without Wings

“Taylor’s voice is one of meditation and reclamation, elegance and unflinching strength. To Let the Sun shows us how to live in the aftermath of trauma, how to come ‘into the world bloody’ and remain: ‘Once, my grandmother / asked if I am born // again. Yes, I told her, I was.’ ”
—Diannely Antigua, author of Good Monster

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

Anyway

On the Anniversary of a Failed Suicide

History of My Godlessness

Golden Pothos

Monster

Come Sunday

Woe

Invocation

Already

Confession

Birdsong

Johnny

Hospital Song

I Keep My Kidney Stones in a Salt Shaker

Vicodin Thinks of Necessity

Vicodin Thinks of the Goldfish

Four Years Empty

Sleep Song

Self-Harm

Dear Friend

In the Garden

Letter to My Mother

After All

Elegy for a Mallard

Death in Late October Revisited

In the Middle, Again

The Last Bramble Cay Melomys

Trying to Pray

In Memory of the Hermit Crab Named Eugene

Two Moments with This Poem in Common

Making Bread

Do You Want to Have Children?

Amazing Grace, Etc.

Mother’s Day

Sleep Hygiene Protocol

Horoscope with Calcium

Blood Song

Elegy for a Chicken Named Roxane

Sugar Ant

After My Therapist Tells Me to Rewrite the Nightmare

Unmonstrous

I Call My Father

Whole

Love Poem for Marie

The Boy Thinks of After

Here

How

Prayer

To Carry

Acknowledgments

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