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BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS
Wild Muse: a Chaptology (Cornerpost Press, December 2022) 
https://tinyurl.com/2m3w96uh
Come and Gone: An Ozark Sonnet
Big summer bugs thud / against the curtainless windows, suicide
for last light after the day / has poured out its bucket of shine.
Fireflies harry the still-green leaves. / Oh Lord of Come and Gone,
let me be stunned / by these final days of summer
 as the sun recasts its slant, / a breeze blows in, gravid with fall.
Let me be capable of feeling / this new season’s chill promise.
Let me be like the leaf, / momentary in fire, content to be lost.


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Start a Journal
 
Begin with evening on the bayou
Black Jack in a Ball jar, borrowed Marlboros.
Describe the sound of the Atchafalaya,
the yelp of hounds back in the swamp.
Add bits of conversation, opinions on liars
and politicians. Complain about reporters
and the state of the art. Tell it all.
Be brazen. How Mother calls too often
and you hate it. Share that part.
Put a date on it—summer.
Spill gin and tonic on the cover.
Do this quick, before the light goes,
before the day narrows down
to the creek bed, the water running away
 
Reading Berryman to the Dog,
(reprint February 2023, Belle Point Press)

 

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Poem Title:              Fairy Tales Now

Fairy Tales Now
Don’t use the word tower
Or the word magic.
Don’t mention grandmother, stepmother,
Roses, or red, red lips.
Don’t say tragic.
Don’t describe the woods
Or throw their braid out the window.
Never climb a vine or a glass mountain.
They could have a vampire,
But they never talk about the river
Unless somebody drowns.

Publication Information: 
On The Way to the Promised Land Zoo, Cyberwit, 2019

Books, Chapbooks, Anthologies
by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
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Doubleback Books announces the release of Wendy Carlisle’s Discount Fireworks.  Discount Fireworks is a hymn to landscape and personal identity, a reminder of the interconnectedness of daily existence. Haunting and beautiful, Carlisle’s poems will transport you into an otherworldly plane grounded in everyday joys. Download your copy of Discount Fireworks on the Doubleback Books website: https://doublebackbooks.wordpress.com/discount-fireworks-by-wendy-t-carlisle/

Mercy of Traffic 
Published: 2019
Publisher: Unlikely Books

"Fearless and irrepressible, Wendy Taylor Carlisle's The Mercy of Traffic ... blazes through falsehood, faces up to trauma, lust, and loss, and shows us how to celebrate the world's precarious beauty. "

-- Ann Fisher-Wirth
​

Price: $15

Click here for a full description or to purchase The Mercy of Traffic 
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50/50 
Published: 2018
Publisher: Quill's Edge Press 

Immerse yourself in an intersectional collection of poetry and translation, featuring the indispensable work of fifty women over 50.  Prepare for your world to split open.
​

Price: $20.00


Click here for a full description or to purchase 50/50
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UNTOLD ARKANSAS 
Published: 2018
Publisher: Et Alia Press

In this wide-ranging, multigenre compilation, fourteen poets, writers, artists, and photographers explore the richness and complication that infuses Arkansas with its character.

Price: $24.95


Click here for a full description or to purchase Untold Arkansas
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IN PLEIN AIR
Published: April 3, 2017
Publisher: Poetic License
​
A gorgeous, limited edition collection of 52 poems in response to the natural world.  Includes 22 graphite illustrations hand-drawn expressly for this anthology.

Price: $25.00


Click here for a full description or to purchase In Plein Air
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THEY WENT TO THE BEACH TO PLAY
Published: April 3, 2017
Publisher: Locofo Chaps
​
A new chapbook of political poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle.
(20 pages)


Price: $5.00


Click here for a full description or to purchase They Went Down To the Beach To Play
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PERSEPHONE ON THE METRO
Published: March 25, 2014
Publisher: MatHat Press

A collection of poems by Wendy Taylor Carlisle. (27 pages)

Price: $7.95

"Carlisle never lets her verse fall into easy, predictable patterns; her appetitive intelligence won't allow that; rather, she's clearly having a very good time..."

Click here for a full description or to purchase Persephone on the Metro
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DISCOUNT FIREWORKS
Published: May 30, 2008
Publisher: Jacaranda Press

A collection of poems by Wendy Taylor Carlisle. (80 pages)

Price: $12.95

With startling elegance and grit, the poems in Discount Fireworks skewer our follies and triumphs and the everydays in between.

Click here for a full description or to purchase Discount Fireworks.
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READING BERRYMAN TO THE DOG
Published: December 1, 2000
Publisher: Jacaranda Press

A collection of poems by Wendy Taylor Carlisle. (52 pages)

Price: $7.95

The poems of Wendy Taylor Carlisle are vibrant, original, intelligent, tough, funny, and sharp as a first time blade.

Click here for a full description or to purchase ​Reading Berryman to the Dog.
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Poems in This Publication


Poem Title:      Thirteen
                     
The boy in the baggy shorts,
tosses back his forelock before he shoots.
When the corners of the cracked court darken,
he saunters in.
 
Six months ago, he was at home in her kitchen,
milk chocolate on his chin,
handicapping the Bulls, describing
the new kid in Algebra,
 
so much a part of her rooms,
he was a chair, the thermometer.
Mom, it’s hot.  Underfoot. 
 
In July he talked about baseball.  Now he reads
alone in the evenings.  He has nothing to say. 
Before he goes out, the boy
 
pulls on his Spurs jersey.
His mother has washed it until it is thin as milk. 

Publication Information:
Discount Fireworks, Doubleback Books, 2021

Poem Title:
Publication Information:​​​​
"Beginning with a line from Desnos"
​

"many times upon a time
or at least more than one time
at a zinc bar in a little café
it could have been
a bit different, she said,
by which she meant a bit better
for her"


The Mercy of Traffic,
Unlikely Books 2019

Poem Title:
"Like A Tide"

"Remember. Try to remember, or, failing that, invent.”
​        --Emma Donoghue
 
Everyday life was water: the lagoon, its angelfish and Sergeant Majors, the harbor where the plane landed, the sea that roistered against my thigh, the river that licked my ear.There was clear water and bath water and seawater and river water and the evening cocktail. 
 
Let’s have something to drinkorsomething with fish in it.
" 
​
Click here for complete poem
Publication Information:​​​
50/50
Quill's Edge Press 2018

Poem Title:
Publication Information:​​
"Blossom"
​

“…old in a blossoming earth”
             
--Robert Creeley

In the south of my childhood, time passed
like a plate of ham. Grandma made lard biscuits,
cooked rashers of bacon, fried pork chops,
presided over the hugging and sassing


Click here for complete poem
Untold Arkansas, 
Et Alia Press  2018

Poem Title:
Publication Information:​
"Buck Mountain" 
​

Before the rain, I couldn't imagine the rain.  It is that way with me.

Yesterday I filled with brilliant sunlight, with air faintly green ...

​
Click here for complete poem.
In Plein Air,
Poetic License 2018



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Poem Title:
​
Publication Information:​
"Tatters"

Fall tatters the body of summer
​with endless flaking, leaves drifting

like dandruff, eyelash, fingernail
the replicable cells ... 

​
Click here for complete poem.
They Went To The Beach To Play,
Locofo Chaps 2016

Poem Title:





Publication Information:
"And Simply Read"

But if the body were a kind of book…   Karen Fiser    
                               

Imagine it as a rectangle,
small enough for a hand to circle,

Click here for complete poem.

Ekphrastic: Writing and Art on Art and Writing  
www.ekphrastic.net

Poem Title:










​Publication Information:
"The Laughter Mechanic"

The laughter mechanic's arrival is routine.  He rents an office, puts ads in the Pennysaver and arranges his tools —funny car, one liner, banana peel.  He waits. Solemn clients show up. 

Click here for complete poem.

Unlikely Stories: Episode IV
www.unlikelystories.org





Poem Title:









​​​
Publication
​Information:
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"Wildcatting"
The redhead is a fool for love.
This September it's a driller from Houston. She trails him east across a landscape
etched with dickey birds.


Click here for complete poem.



Reading Berryman to the Dog, 
2000, Jacaranda Press
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