Taylor Brady

Microclimates

ISBN 1-928650-09-0
$9.00
165 pages

Microclimatesis vast. Powered by an allegorizied critique of the saturated suburban self, it lacks the usual restraints. Its Proustian extensions of time, memory, physicality, honor and passion display the Southern family in what can only be called a unique light. Taylor Brady's nuanced rhetoric frames a strangely modern sincerity. Also modern is the relentless morphing of genders and genres. The poems in the novel, as well as its actual and narrated images, retain a sense of the materiality of language which is unusal in the novel form and is, in the event, extremely satisfying. It's like watching a (dissonant,improvised) musical in which the songs are as good as the (nonlinear but tightly plotted) story. The whole novel exists in each of its endless lines. A whole generation is implicated in its attitude. Microclimates is not only a great first book, it is one of the most compelling, most symptomatic books of the new century.

--Laura Moriarty

Microclimates is a genre-bending tour de force, a textual body in which Taylor Brady pushes all the pressure points of poetry, family saga, politics, scholarly apparatus, documentary, commonplace book, musicology. And with its recasting of epistolary tropes, it's sort of a Dangerous Liaisons for the thinking man or woman. Expunged from a landscape of dream, Microclimates takes "you to/ another earth/ entirely." Behind the keen intelligence and wit, a sizzling steam rises, spelling out the words S=O=U=T=H=F=L=O=R=I=D=A in bursts of Althusserian lightning.

--Dodie Bellamy

Global systems of pressure are total, but microclimates are everywhere in the local margins of economic and syntactic fronts. In these interstices, Taylor Brady practices a microclimatic opposition, not by way of interminable documentation, but through the determined work of this expansive writing in which New Narrative and New Sentence are treated to a pivotal rapprochement. Every one of Brady's sentences is a microclimate and "a citation of something like totality," a totality to which only a critical paranoia can refer sanely. Sentence by sentence, Microclimates surveys the terrain between position and situation, maps the tensions between imaginary relations and real conditions, and transfigures the space between global and Floridian horizons. Having ceased to refer melancholically to a remembrance of things past, Microclimates performs the search for "my full relation to my time," an awesome construction committed to producing the vanishing moments of its own historical truth. Not only a stunning read, Brady's novel is perhaps the most advanced historiography of our day.

--Rob Halpern

Taylor Brady was born in Dunedin, Florida in 1972. He has lived in Tampa, Sarasota, Brooklyn, Buffalo, and, since 1998, San Francisco. His first chapbook, Is Placed/Leaves, appeared in 1996 from Meow Books in Buffalo. For the past five years he has been writing an extended serial poem, To Not, whose parts include lyric, prose poetry, a novel, and a series of short essays. Sections of this project have appeared in journals, and in the recent chapbook 33549 (Leroy Books, 2000). Microclimates is the first book-length section of the To Not project.