Books

Cover reveal for Lisa's new novel The Shape of What Remains, a story about the choices one woman makes as she begins to heal from intractable grief.

Pre-order information coming soon. The book will be available in late February 2025.

Book tour in spring of 2025. Please contact Lisa at whitewaterwriting@gmail.com with requests for readings, workshops, classroom visits, booksignings and book group adoption. Lisa is available to visit or Zoom with book groups. Find her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads.  

Lisa C. Taylor’s new book of poems, Interrogation of Morning, is a stellar marriage of close observation and an energetic imagination. Exploring what she calls “Love’s geometry,” Taylor maps out a territory of beginnings and elegies, of questions and paradoxes. Three stunning poems remember her father; a self-portrait is fashioned from heady non-sequiturs; and an evocative piece riffs off Robert Frost (“There are promises to keep so I write the word promise next to key. // Distance is a promise. The road is a promise. Your mouth is a key. Your hands are keys.”) There are fine narratives here (one poem begins, “My mother’s ninety-year-old friend sang New York, New York from her nursing home bed with such zeal it set off the alarm…”) as well as poems that ride the rails of metaphor (“Sleep is a dock without a cleat hitch, a dory swaying.”) The speaker of this book of changes is in the midst of a move to the wild lands of Colorado, and she asks, what do we save, what do we take with us from the old life, what should we value enough to transplant into the new (“a folded-over page of Roethke”)? “Nothing remains rooted for long” she writes in an evocative pantoum, “The Ferry Crossing at Inishmore.” Everything is on the move here, though what we leave carries “the imprint of arrival.” And once we emerge from hard times, “How will any of us know / when it is safe to mingle / over a meal or bottle of wine?” Here is a book to celebrate, wherever you are!

— Annie Deppe, Night Collage

Interrogation of Morning, published in Ireland in 2022, is available locally at:

Zu Gallery
48 West Main Street
Cortez, Colorado 81321

970-235-1107

www.zugallery.com

Available through: Syracuse University Press,   Bookshop.org   and  Amazon.com

This anthology offers seriously admirable work. Highly recommended.

— Arley Sorg, Lightspeed Magazine

Lisa has one story in this anthology.

All profits will benefit The Rosenberg Fund for Children. 

Dreams for a Broken World is available for pre-order now at: dreamsforabrokenworld.com.

Available through: Barnesandnoble.com   and  Amazon.com

The short story dwells within narrow corridors and, in Impossibly Small Spaces, a collection that seamlessly matches form with content, Lisa C. Taylor gifts the reader with cut-glass explorations of the diminishing spaces and of the freedoms – illusory, elusive – so craved by a heartbreakingly real cast of characters.

— Alan McMonagle

The stories in Impossibly Small Spaces write you into a world that is very much today's America. Intensely lyrical, it is brimming with characters whose lives are being shaped by the strictures of their own inadequacies. Hugely perceptive, sizzling wih electric images, this is top-class writing where grace and precision are brought to bear on lives that glow brightly in the reader's mind long after the last page.

— Geraldine Mills

Available through: Syracuse University Press,   Bookshop.org   and  Amazon.com

A recent widow seeks the services of a psychic, two children are placed in a witness protection program, a young woman is discovered hiding in a garden shed, and a doctor suddenly disappears. The characters in Lisa C. Taylor's debut collection of short stories inhabit worlds as familiar as your local restaurant and as strange as a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital. These stories take the reader on a dark but ultimately redemptive ride.

The stories in Growing a New Tail will move you with their honesty and sustain you with their compassionate and fierce commitment to human resilience. Taylor's characters are as real as your neighbors, as exasperating, complex and present as your family...

— Richard Hoffman, author of Love and Fury

Growing a New Tail has me growing a new admiration for Lisa C. Tayor. If you know her as an accomplished poet, you’ll join me in marvelling at how deftly she hops to prose – even incorporating some braiding of the forms – in this strong collection fittingly about reinvention.

— Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of This is Paradise

Available through: Syracuse University Press, Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

Necessary Silence explores the range of human vulnerability from a homeless person to a Virgin Mary sighting to strangers meeting in a grocery line, “forgetting how invisible we all are/for most of our lives.” Themes of serious illness, childhood violence, and mortality are present along with an unfaltering belief in the possibility of love altering both the present and the future, “cracking open the barn door.”

Lisa C. Taylor’s poems show the importance of slowing down and paying attention, of listening to others, of asking what the deepest self feels. Taylor knows that the imagination is the most powerful tool we have for transformation, and in her words, ‘the world is given back to us, radiant’.

— Ted Deppe

Through adroit, haunting images, Lisa C. Taylor traces our fraught, and at times dire intersections. At the core of her poetry resides an honesty of awe and a bittersweet awareness of how little we know and how much we care. A poet of both depth and gravity, she never averts her gaze yet her tone remains tender.

— Baron Wormser

Lisa C. Taylor’s poems are marked by their arresting combination of fertile, funky, natural imagery with a courageous and searching emotional honesty. As she writes, “in the eventual darkness/this will be what matters.”

— Annie Finch

Available through: Syracuse University Press, Bookshop.org and Amazon.com

In summer 2009, two award-winning poets, Lisa C. Taylor from Connecticut, and Geraldine Mills from Galway, came to a little cottage in Carna on the west coast of Ireland to forge a link between their lives. Other Side of Longing celebrates this collaboration. With the Atlantic Ocean as the central metaphor, they explore themes of culture, folklore, flora, and fauna through a series of call and response, weaving in and out of their own internal and external landscapes. This collaboration of poems is infused with each other’s experience in all its humanity, while retaining individual voice and lyrical honesty.

Available through: Syracuse University Press, Bookshop.org, and Amazon.com