“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid” —Goethe
"Supplee is concerned with priestlienss and wizardry and inquisition (in the ordinary and scary senses of that word), and like Hopkins's, his poems lead to the devotional body, a body that in turn blurs the sacred, the courtly, and the profane."
—B.K. Fischer
"And in the way of some of the most fascinating and compelling poetry, the poems are often examining how poetry itself is teasing the reality it is exploring into being again, into a state that can be vividly, sorrowfully, and gloriously experienced by others. The work seems to me to aim for this alchemical feat described by Dickinson as 'a divine insanity.'"
—Alice Quinn
Artist statement for Supplee’s manuscript Maleficarum
A collection recording the secret events of the night carried out in the small light of an alchemical grief, kept in its glass sleeve, set upon the desk of the one obligated to give testimony, Maleficarum confronts the extremities of a world rendered suddenly foreign and inhospitable. Desperate for some word or other signal from beyond the further boundary, the speaker becomes susceptible to any form of omen or phenomena which could be construed as sign or answer. Inevitably, when the departed voice lacks even a ghost in the observed instances of contact—the false auguries, major arcana obscured by dim candelabra—the speaker throws himself wholly into the world, straddling doubt and celebration, the “sacred, courtly, and profane.” While stitched through with grief, Maleficarum does not crutch itself on the merely elegiac. This collection ultimately is a celebration of the poetic impetus itself, deploying the lyric as a means to transfigure images, musics, sentiments, and events from one form into another—the lyric, itself, discovered as the azoth undergirding the structured world. This collection is dedicated to the poet’s teachers, the witches to whom he belongs, to the masters who have gone first into the dark, lamps lit.
Photo Credit: Dennis Forkas, Wraith Kneading a Snowball / Allegory of Winter, 2013-2014
A poet of the baroque,
Taylor Supplee earned his MFA from Columbia University where he served as the first Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A nominee for Best New Poets 2022, a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize in 2020 and the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are published in Baltimore Review, Carve, Diode, The Fiddlehead, Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, Kestrel, The Moth, The Penn Review, Phoebe, Quiddity, Rattle, SLAB, Thrush and elsewhere. He works as a project manager of architectural metals for P1 Construction and lives in Kansas City.