Wholesale Become Ocean, by Ed Taylor

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Become Ocean collects recent responses to contemporary daily life filtered through primal principles—things that can provide perspective and some version of sanity. The poems here move from darkness to light, irony to fantasy, still life observation to self-exile from political catastrophe, existential humor to spiritual redemption, 16th century Moroccan Sufi poet Sidi Abderrahman el Mejdub to contemporary American pop jazz and lounge music collective Pink Martini—all infused with the spark created by a current of movement between presence and absence, in every moment: like ocean. Ed Taylor (he/him) is the author of the novel Theo, the poetry collection Idiogest, a Ravenna Press “Triple”, and 5 chapbooks. His prose and poetry have appeared in over 70 U.S., U.K., Australian, and Canadian periodicals and his most recent multimedia performance work is the 2021 1-act play “Black Nikes” (Alleyway Theatre).