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Microclimates
is 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.
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