Finalist, 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize ARRIVAL is a poetic love story between mother and daughter. The poems are road maps, intertwining generations with a narrative beginning in 1950 with a woman who is pregnant with twins. In her seventh month she delivers a stillborn boy and a baby girl weighing less than two pounds. From there, the evocation of a series of catastrophic family events brings forth Cheryl Boyce-Taylor’s power to strip her readers down to their most vulnerable. Boyce-Taylor is steeped in the narratives of Trinidad and New York City, colored with metaphorical stew-pot images. She revels in her lyrical range as she weaves these poetic retellings of family, place, and identity.

ARRIVAL: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Boyce-Taylor, Cheryl

Poetry

TriQuarterly

We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a collection of political love poems rendered through the eyes of Cheryl Boyce‑Taylor, an immigrant living in New York City. For many women of color, aging in America means experiencing a lack of proper medical treatment, inhumane living conditions, poor nutrition, and often isolation. Many seniors feel thrown away, useless, and vulnerable. These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honor, and endurance. During these rough political times, they are salve and balm.\nBorn in Trinidad and having grown up in Queens, Boyce‑Taylor creates a framework for her own experience out of the life experiences and work of beloved Black women in history. She salutes the women who have lifted her, including Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ntozake Shange, and Winnie Mandela, as well as her mother, Eugenia Boyce, and her beloved daughter‑in‑law, Deisha Head Taylor.\nThe poems in this collection are unapologetic, fierce, and confrontational while remaining caring and intimate. They stand strong in the face of adversity and boldly demand what is owed while still honoring and cherishing what is loved.

We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems

Raw AirPoems by Cheryl Boyce Taylor "Raw Air sizzles with energy.Boyce Taylor is an acrobat of poetry---leaping in dazzling,daring moves from poignantfamily poems to highly chargedsensual poems. With amazing skill she balances poems resonant with clarity, imagesfresh and often startling."Laura Boss "Here is Cheryl Boyce Taylor, "Poet Laureate" of Trinidadvia Low East Side/Brooklyn,in full book regalia! Arollicking life force churnsair into dance when Cherylreads her poems, sings andraves her poems---a guidedtour of the island. Readsilently, you become a partof family history---a familywho lives in places wherebodies connect and separate,where joy and pain are food.Here are mothers and children,love and more love, the seaof life. Open Raw Air andbreathe deep!"Bob Holman Boyce Taylor is a performance poet, activist and visual artist. She was born in Trinidad. She holds a BA inTheater, an MEd from Long IslandUniversity and an MSW fromFordham University. The book contains a kind,encouraging inscribed note with signature by the poet. First edition Some waving from improper storage. Should flatten with weight applied. Wear to cover.Interior clean.

Raw Air

Fly-by-Night Press

Mama Phife Represents: A Memoir (BreakBeat Poets)

Award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik 'Phife Dawg' Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest in this intimate collection. Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother's grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik wrote to his parents beginning at age eight. Both elegy and praise song, there is joy and sorrow, healing, and a mother's triumphant heart that rises and blooms again.&nbsp;

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Haymarket Books

Mama Phife Represents is an arresting document of the body's lowest depth of hurt, from a poet and mother who suddenly loses her son to Type 1 diabetes at the height of his musical career. It is a love letter from a grieving mother to her child.

Encompassing the breadth of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's astounding career, The Limitless Heart is a time capsule of the boundless love, care, grief, and fortitude that make her work so stirring. With deep empathy, thoughtfulness, charisma, and lyricism, Boyce-Taylor's work explores questions of immigration, motherhood, and queer sensuality, among other themes. Grief is both an anchor and a door throughout Boyce-Taylor's poetry, as seen in Mama Phife Represents, a hybrid of memoir and verse on the death of her son, Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor of A Tribe Called Quest. Questions regarding Blackness and Black womanhood in the United States are stitched throughout her books, and Boyce-Taylor leans into a more overtly defiant political register in her latest work, We Are Not Wearing Helmets, while maintaining the connective spine of the Trinidadian dialect that appears throughout all her work. Selections from these books, as well as her other poetry collections, appear in this new volume. Curated from Boyce-Taylor's body of work, The Limitless Heart encapsulates her progression as a writer throughout the decades of her highly successful career.

The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boyce-Taylor, Cheryl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Boyce-Taylor, Cheryl

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boyce-Taylor, Cheryl. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

ARRIVAL: Poems

We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems

Raw Air

Mama Phife Represents: A Memoir (BreakBeat Poets)

Mama Phife Represents: A Memoir (BreakBeat Poets)

The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems (1997-2022)