Cities Within Us

Cities Within Us is a collection of poems by Peter Taylor, written in dense, layered language that works on several levels at once and often surprises with sudden juxtapositions and bursts of wordplay. The poems range from the intimately personal to the openly confessional.

Taylor casts a wide net of clashing voices: a piece of type, a bee, an orang-outang, Franklin, and people who are delusional or abused. Together they inhabit a world that feels both limitless and inevitable.

Images and feelings carry the reader across very different territory, from the disappearance of arctic explorers, to the razing and rebuilding of the Dresden Frauenkirche, to a child's comically innocent trip to Mars. Throughout, the poems explore the inner landscapes of imagination and reality, and the human capacity for both joy and loss.