To Let the Sun (Miller Williams Poetry Prize)

Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

John Allen Taylor's debut poetry collection To Let the Sun opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: "take a walk with me . . . I hope you'll come / though I am going anyway." These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child's flight from himself, and the uncertain path home-to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: "I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we're needed by.