Books

Collections by Richard Allen Taylor

Order any of Richard’s books individually or as a set. See details below.

Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems begins with poems addressed to or about the famous singer, her life, career, and tragic death, then moves on to Taylor’s personal poems about the loss of his wife to an acute form of leukemia, and the subsequent journey through grief and recovery to life on the other side of loss.

If I wanted to invent something, but I knew only that I wanted my invention to be dazzling from every angle, I would call on Richard Allen Taylor, whose poems in Letters to Karen Carpenter are each small miracles of construction. Draw near them, and you will hear the poet’s brain sawing through the trivial to reach the essential. Come closer. Now feel the thrum of an out-sized heart that has known pain and grief, tenderness and joy. Letters to Karen Carpenter simply takes my breath.
—Dannye Romine Powell, author In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver

To purchase, visit The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore:
Letters to Karen Carpenter

Armed and Luminous is based on the author’s premise that “If I were in charge of heaven, I’d have an angel for everything, not just deaths and annunciations.”

In his fine volume of poems, Armed and Luminous, Richard Allen Taylor’s gaze remains fixed on “the blue pearl of earth”—a perspective that issues, literally, from on high. Taylor’s quirky, unforgettable speakers have the power to conjure and dispatch angels on a whim, those of lore like Michael and Gabriel, but fallen angels as well, strangers that “blend in like sand in the desert.” With grace, humor, and abundant humanity, these memorable poems dig down to the daily fodder and pomp of what it’s like to draw breath on the mysterious earth, that plane of faith and desire vouchsafed through language.
—Joseph Bathanti, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2012-2014

To purchase, visit The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore:
Armed and Luminous

Punching Through the Egg of Space is an eclectic mix of poems about art, culture, everyday events made extraordinary, and themes of starting over and renewal, as well as a tribute to the poet Mary Oliver.

Richard Allen Taylor’s Punching Through the Egg of Space takes us on a wild ride, where our own planet becomes “a diminishing dot.” We find the flip side of the ordinary in the simplicity of saltines, which, “in a pinch … can be communion bread,” and in the paradox of the human heart: “… if we love enough to make love/bombs, how many would it take to save the world?” Taylor deftly balances a constellation of humor, gravity, and exuberance. His new collection is a song of joy, a “celebration plucked from a banjo made in heaven.”
—Ann Campanella, author of The Beach Poems

To purchase, visit The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore:
Punching Through the Egg of Space

Something to Read on the Plane, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Chapbook Prize in 2004, contains some of Taylor’s best known and oft-requested poems, including “Tuesday,” “Calendar Girl,” and “Part Time Clown.” In many ways, this little book was a harbinger of what poet and memoirist Rebecca McClanahan would later describe as Taylor’s “deadly humorous” approach to comedy. The entertaining and accessible poems in Something to Read on the Plane are as fun to read on the ground as in the air—the ideal gift for readers who resist reading poetry because it might be boring.

To purchase, visit The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore:
Something to Read on the Plane

Buy Richard’s “Quartet Bundle”—all four books—for just $35.

Note the cost of purchasing the books separately would be $50 + tax and shipping.

To purchase, visit The Main Street Rag Online Bookstore: Richard Allen Taylor Quartet