Alfred Hitchcock often complained about horror movies and stories that used supernatural antagonists. He felt that since there was so many terrifying things that could happen to a person, it was absurd to make up fantastic creatures and situations to frighten an audience.
Taylor Graham might be a poetic solution to Hitchcock's take on fiction. She writes about situations that are not only plausible, but likely --situations that many of us know for ourselves-- and adds a spin of horror and trauma that keeps us engrossed as if in fantasy.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. Her poetry has been described as sobering and gritty, forceful and clear. With a Master's degree in Comparative Literature, she writes about everyday things and thoughts. She's "an acute observer of nature and human nature, and her style, while seemingly chiseled and laconic, allows for a surprising wealth of humor and lyricism."
"I get poems from searches for lost people, from dreams, from things I imagine about other people, from watching my dogs and cat -- even from ordering menudo in a border café." Her collection Casualties: search-and-rescue poems (Coal City, 1995) is profiled in the 1998 Poet's Market. Individual poems appear in America, The Iowa Review, Passages North, Psychological Perspectives, Santa Clara Review, 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse and, online, Aabye's Baby, Big Dog Review, King Log, Pif, Melic Review, Zuzu's Petals and elsewhere. Her collection An Hour in the Cougar's Grace (Pudding House, 2000) received a Pipistrelle Best of the Small Press Award. Her latest is Still Life with Wood Smoke (Mt. Aukum Press, 2002), and she have a couple other collections looking for a home. You can e-mail her at piper@innercite.com.
Taylor's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2003:
Meltdown
Field Notes, 31 Jul
Wake-Up
Care Giving and Taking
Music-In-Fusion
July 1998 - July 1999:
Two Orders of Menudo
471 Booth Street
Tuesday 4:59 A.M.