Bone Valley Hymnal
My debut poetry collection is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in March 2025.
Bone Valley Hymnal arrives from the molten core of Utah’s arid landscapes. Here, with the fossils mothers pass down to their daughters, Franson-Thiel weaves hymns of heritage and gender performativity. In a pursuit to reconcile the self from one's ancestry, she unearths a “line of graves/a long ribcage”. These poems present compelling connections between science, gender, faith, and myth-making.
Fans of the work of Alda Merini, K-Ming Chang, and Emily Skaja will enjoy the electric and surprising imagery of Franson-Thiel’s poetry.
Praise For Bone Valley Hymnal
Michael Sowder, author of The Empty Boat and House Under the Moon
“In these poems of Taylor Franson-Thiel’s, there is a fierceness and fearless vulnerability, a generosity of spirit and poetic brilliance that resonate in a voice erupting through poetic convention, where family, heritage, landscape, religion, patriarchy, and violence are interrogated, blown apart, internalized, made a part of the body, made body parts, and reconfigured into a new myth of being alive in a body holding fast to what it means to love and be loved. In these poems, tenderness and revolution walk hand in hand.”
Alyse Knorr, author of Super Mario Bros. 3, Ardor, and Wolf Tours
In Bone Valley Hymnal, Taylor Franson grapples with ancestral legacies of violence, from ancient Viking mother conquerors to the more recent Mormon victims of statewide extermination orders. “Somewhere inside me is a watershed rivering/apart my family line,” she writes. “The lineage of water—/a burden I have forgotten how to carry.” Against the desert landscape of Utah, Franson explores questions of faith and doubt, safety and desire, and mortality and grief, drawing upon matrilineal inheritances of resilience to consider how we survive patriarchal abuse and oppression. These formally varied, sonically resonant poems, delivered in the structure of a hymnbook, offer a haunting language of covenant, sacrament, and prophecy as they meditate on the body and all it survives. In this collection, Franson debuts as the gifted and bold voice of a generation with blood as its birthrite.