Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives with her husband in a home they built on a hillside in the Arkansas Ozarks. She has an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the author of two other books Reading Berryman to the Dog and Discount Fireworks (both Jacaranda Books) and five chapbooks, most recently They Went Down to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps). See her work in anthologies such as In Plein Air (Poetic License Press), Untold: Arkansas: An Anthology (et Alia) and 50/50: Poems and Translations by Womxn Over Fifty (Quills Edge Press).

Books by Wendy Taylor Carlisle:

Other poems on the web by Wendy Taylor Carlisle:
"Nuns"
"These Days"
Four poems
Two poems
Two poems
"About the Weather"
"Sudden"
"Her Husband"
"The Circus of Inconsolable Loss"

Wendy Taylor Carlisle's Website.

About The Mercy of Traffic:

"In one of the poems in this exceptional collection, Wendy Taylor Carlisle quotes Wallace Stevens's belief that 'The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.' By that standard, Carlisle is one of the richest poets alive. Her poems are packed with powerfully vivid and original sensory detail. Have you ever noticed that a grackle looks 'shiny as spoiled meat'? Well, after reading this book you will forever see grackles—and many other aspects of the physical world—through Carlisle's wise and incisive eyes. What's more, you'll come to know Carlisle, or at least the persona she creates, in all of her intimate complexity. Her book ends with the words 'all I have to say is, Here I am, Honey. Here I am.' And here she most definitely is. To paraphrase Whitman, who holds this book holds a woman."
—David Jauss

"Fearless and irrepressible, Wendy Taylor Carlisle's The Mercy of Traffic touches down on a Florida childhood survived by 'cunning and wit,' where, as she acerbically remarks, 'they taught fashion which is disguised prejudice / and manners which are mostly separation and meanness.' Eventually escaping, she makes her picaresque way through hardships and adventures to the Ozarks, her home for many years, where the signs say 'OZARK, PECHES, PUPIES FOR SALE,' and 'the mountains overrun your mind / like wisteria covers a whitewashed porch.' This is a book that blazes through falsehood, that faces up to trauma, lust, and loss, and that shows us how to celebrate the world's precarious beauty."
—Ann Fisher-Wirth

"In one poem Wendy Carlisle describes how she feels 'jazz seeping into me with its nightliness and its cool distance,' and indeed that may be one of the best descriptions of this outstanding book. From a central perspective in the Ozarks (including a variety of Ozark sonnets) Carlisle links an enormous variety of people and concerns. From the everyday of the grits, banjos, Everclear and country singers to Boston, embroidered chemise, the Caribbean and Vivaldi she gives us what few poets can accomplish—the real, lived world. How does she doe this—a terrific ear for language and metaphor: 'In the south of my childhood, time passed / like a plate of fried chicken, she writes in one poem. ' Torrents come as a surprise, / boil the creek with runoff, pulse the flannel hillside light with crows,' she writes in another. This is the real world she see hidden in the world we thought we knew, and now know better. Why else would one read?"
—Richard Jackson

"'If I ever said my life was balanced, / what I meant was on the edge of a blade,' Wendy Taylor Carlisle writes. The poems in The Mercy of Traffic are balanced so: swaying between exterior and interior, love and loneliness, pastoral and the Anthropocene. From Snow White to Elizabeth Bishop, nothing and no one can elude Carlisle's poetic grasp, roping vivid imagery and imaginative storytelling into 'Ozark Sonnets' that buck typical poetic restraints to flood across the page. 'I have no choice,' she writes, 'my memory is a thirsty hound.' Kneeling on memory's sharp edge, we're invited to cup the blade to our lips, to drink deeply of a life well-lived and rendered into song."
—Stacey Balkun