Bone Valley Hymnal
My debut poetry collection is available now from ELJ Editions.
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.
Reviews of Bone Valley Hymnal -
Reviews of Bone Valley Hymnal -
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.”
Regie Cabico, author of A Rabbit In Search of a Rolex
The emotional forces of ancestral calamities converge with lyrical power. These poems escort the reader into a world of devastating yet stunning perseverance where the physical body and lineage become a constitution of fierce hymns during these unprecedented times.
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.
Peter Strekfus, author of The Cuckoo (Yale Series of Younger Poets), and Errings
In Bone Valley Hymnal, Taylor Franson-Thiel shuttles the lyric forward and backward in time, as if weaving a new garment for a voice awakened—a new garment, a body of hymns that "exiles untruth like skin rejects a graft.”
Sally Keith, author of River House, Two of Everything, and The Fact of the Matter
The poems in Taylor Franson-Thiel ’s Bone Valley Hymnal are unquestionably lyric poems, by which I mean not only do they carry with them the quality of song, but that the songs feel as though they arrive to us from somewhere deep within, somewhere possibly unknown but undoubtedly felt. As Franson-Thiel explores back past her own existence, listening for her ancestors’ advice and inspiration, whether a “believer” or “faint-of-heart follower,” this brave book “grasp[] at wisps” and sings out into our present tense. Listen, reader. You are in for a treat.