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.”
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.
“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
“There is a tenderness in Taylor’s poetry that I can’t find anywhere else, and I know I’ll be returning to this collection for the rest of my life. Taylor writes, ‘come & see / it’s not so terrible to exist’, and I believe him.”
—Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”
