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Parallel Press Publishes Going Wrong
Posted 09/04/2009
MADISON, Wis. –Marilyn Taylor, Wisconsin’s current Poet Laureate, contemplates the emotions that accompany the realities of aging in her most 
recent chapbook, Going Wrong (September 2009). This is the latest in the poetry chapbook series published by the UW–Madison Libraries’ Parallel Press. In Going Wrong the speaker looks back on her life as she observes a woman whom she deems “far too dazzling to be [a] mother.” The speaker misses her youthful body and dreams to “find [herself] a job as a super-model, / get [herself] to those Peloponnesian beaches / where [she’d] preen all day with a jug of ouzo / in [her] bikini.”
Marilyn L. Taylor’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, Measure, and many other journals and anthologies. Her work has taken first place in competitions sponsored by Dogwood, Passager, The Ledge, GSU Review, and The Atlanta Review. Her second full-length poetry collection titled Subject to Change (David Robert Books, 2004) was nominated for the Poets Prize in 2005.
Taylor taught poetry and poetics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Department of English and for the university’s Honors College for many years. She is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine, where her articles on poetic craft appear bi-monthly. She served as Poet Laureate of Milwaukee for 2004-05 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Wisconsin in 2008.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection for her chapbook, Going Wrong:
November in Verona, Wisconsin
A brutal afternoon. Sleet’s been clattering
against the windows, hammering the lawn
to stubble, and the girl inside has drawn
a little closer to the fire, scattering
brochures in random drifts across the floor.
She longs for Europe, yearns for its sublimes
decay; cathedrals lined with crumbling saints
and martyrs, darkening portraiture, the faint
remains of frescoes bleeding through the grime—
graffiti out of fourteen eighty-four,
And ah, the great stone castles—stormed
by those whose bloody lives and stunning deaths
were woven, later, into song and myth,
fabliaux that ultimately formed
an endless fountainhead of metaphor.
Outside, the frigid winds still agitate,
attempting in their unrelenting way
to bring a bit of drama to her day—
as if these latitudes could compensate
for all she lacks, and all she’s longing for.
