Blue Light Press congratulates the winners of the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize.
This year two books were selected to be published next year:
Charles Rammelkamp – A Magician Among the Spirits
Anique Sara Taylor – Civil Twilight
Available soon. Amazon. Or order signed copy on Contact Page.
Civil Twilight, Anique Sara Taylor’s award-winning poetry collection, is, in a word,
mesmerizing. Each of the thirty poems, of just five lines and thirty words each, shimmers with a refined intensity, taut and expansive at the same time. Taylor manages, within this tight form, to communicate a richness of emotion, in language as lyric as it is restrained. The shadow of grief and loss, as well as the affirmation of love and the stubborn simple glories of existence, emerge on the page—the gifts of Taylor’s inner iconography. These resonate with her allusions, organic and real, to the natural world, her outer landscape. Starfish, eagles, crickets, sky and earth, thunderstorms, a sycamore tree—all are conspirators in her story of survival. “Half daughter, half swallow,” she writes, “if only I could tie down the corners of the air.” I suggest, in Civil Twilight, Anique Sara Taylor has done just that.
––Leslie T. Sharpe, author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills
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 