A Room Above a Convenience Store

William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, and a volume of fiction. His work has been published widely in journals across the globe, including Rattle, The New York Quarterly, and The Chiron Review. He was a recipient of the 2013 Kathy Acker Award, and edited Cocky Moon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline (Zeitgeist Press, 2014). A Room Above a Convenience Store, (Roadside Press) is his latest collection of poetry.'A William Taylor poem, like Christmas, brings out the best and worst in us. These poems are set somewhere in the distance between American promise and American experience, a landscape of mislaid hopes that turns out to offer a kind of happiness.As voices come and go, some lost, some dead, the rhythm of moving from one rundown scene to another builds until it’s suddenly broken by a line that flares like a match in a dark alley- ’someone who’ll build a kite out of losing tickets,’ ’the quick gift of afternoon light’ or simply having ’nowhere to be in the morning.’Never asking too much of the world, WT has located enough minor miracles among the ruins to carry him, and anyone else drinking up these poems, on through the days and nights ahead.' -- Peter Milton Walsh, singer/songwriter, The Apartments'The poems of A Room Above a Convenience Store are raw and honest with William Taylor Jr.’s clear-eyed vision of ’the beauty and the terror’ of these plague times we find ourselves shuffling through. Taylor captures the loneliness and the suffering of this crazy, broken world of ours-’the fire and fear’ that surround us-but his poems also point to the horizon at what might be a small shard of hope. Yes, there is an ’endless ocean of loss.’ Yes, we are haunted by the ghosts of our memories. Yes, we fail and fail. But these poems tell us that there are still sometimes pretty things, moments of beauty and grace, ’quick gifts of light’ shining despite the darkness, if only we keep looking for them. Taylor tells us there is something like joy to be found in the music of things around us, as long as we keep listening for something that sings.' -Scott Silsbe, author of Meet Me Where We Survive'I read William Taylor Jr.’s poems with a delicious dread, or call it envy, or call it the anxiety of recent influence, because his writing makes me want to write more, and I sort of want to write like him, for the way he captures the beating heart of human sadness, that pulse beneath the streets and behind the faces of strangers, which he manages to infuse with both the singular beauty of the everyday and a rare compassion for the broken among us, and so I want to go out and watch this fallen world with him and toast our fortunes as poets, poor as they may be, because in his work I am led back to the lost art of seeing, and for that I am ever grateful.' - Carl Watson, author of Beneath the Empire of the Birds