‘The news’ can mean many things, but first and foremost in this collection the news is–We’re having a baby! Starting in the fifth week of his wife’s pregnancy, Rob Taylor wrote a poem every week as they travelled toward their child’s birth. His poems anticipate the astonishing and yet commonplace beginning of a human life, but they also explore how a baby’s arrival streams into both the incessant chatter of the world’s daily news and into that other sort of news that literature carries–what Ezra Pound called “news that stays news”.

Finalist for the 2018 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.

Rob Taylor was born and raised in Port Moody, BC, and lives in Vancouver with his wife and son. He is the author of two books of poetry: The News (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and The Other Side of Ourselves (Cormorant Books, 2011). In 2017, The News was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and in 2010 the manuscript for The Other Side of Ourselves won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize. He was the poetry editor at PRISM international in 2014–15. Rob has run a blog devoted to Canadian poetry, Roll of Nickels, since 2006. In 2015 he received the City of Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award for the Literary Arts as an emerging artist. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Rob Taylor's profile page