Japlish Whiplash

For two decades Taylor Mignon s ear has been washed and gauzed by rock, reggae and hip-hop, while his eye has tumbled head over heels through concrete and visual realms. And his mind has stretched while tasting the sweet and bitter of east and west. Out of the shaken-head synthesis he has forged a unique poetic sphere, not an easy accomplishment in this age of vicarious flatness and supernormality. This long-awaited book of poems by Taylor Mignon a gift from the veteran wordsmith arrives like a wave that rolls effortlessly from years at sea and crashes on the shore inside our skulls. writes John Solt, author of Chocolate Poems, Circling Rainbows & Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: the Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono Katue
Too late to be a beatnik-zennist, and both too hip and too tender to pose in academic mimicry, the Mignon I find alive in these works is perhaps best described as a Japanized projectivist poet with an original sense of sound and a quirky cross-cultural intelligence. He is utterly post-modern in that his poems are the metaphorical equivalents of computer files which need to be decompressed before they can be downloaded. writes Sherry Reniker, editor of World s Edge, author of Geo Frictions and a few short lines (Light & Dust Books)
Mignon smashes syntax and convention like a guitar in his mad jazz performance of word. As if changing keys between e.e.cummings & the post-modern Japanese poets he translates, this poetry is challenging, fresh and alive. Ry Beville, editor of Koe, translator of Nakahara Chuya s Poems of Days Past