WORD! with Maria Taylor

  • This PAST event happened on: Thu, Jun 30, 2022

  • Venue:Attenborough Arts Centre, Lancaster Road, LE1 7HA
  • Time:7:30pm
  • Cost:£4 / £7
  • Main Contact:[email protected]
  • Web Address:https://attenborougharts.com
  • Join us in June for a WORD! with Maria Taylor. Maria is a British Cypriot poet, reviewer and university lecturer. Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2012 and shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). She has been published widely, including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement and highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry.

    * To book an open mic slot and/or workshop with Maria from 4.30 - 6.30pm in advance of the show, drop a line to [email protected]
    Praise for Dressing for the Afterlife:

    "Maria Taylor's new collection is exhilaratingly bold. These imaginative poems strike at the edges of form and emotional experience to uncover glittering seams...They are consistently surprising, a horse revealed as Dustin Hoffman, a married woman irritated at discovering Daniel Craig in her bed... By turns hilarious and stirring, Dressing for the Afterlife is a cinematic gathering I know I'll replay again and again." – John McCullough

    "Taylor’s art is surefooted, with a quiet command of line length, a gift for choosing the right detail to illuminate her slyly weighty subject matter and an unsentimental but affecting directness of address. Her poems are firmly rooted in the day-to-day complexities of familial ties and duties, but her extravagantly vagrant thought paths lure us on to follow fancy into unsettling and exhilarating territory." - Kathy Pimlott

    "Dressing for the Afterlife is no hard task in Maria Taylor’s new collection, as the afterlife appears as just another altered state we inhabit, alongside fear, drunkenness, and the many kinds of love. In this ever-shifting world, sustenance comes in reliance on one’s self and one’s family.  In Taylor’s lively and engaging poems, we find both the richness of experience and remembered sources of strength and so a book to read and reread." - Carrie Etter