A warning and a prayer against future storms, do not destroy this stands as testament to the indomitable spirit of survivors confronted by the inexhaustible forces of nature. In this debut collection, Taylor Clement celebrates the joy and grit of living in the deep south during compound disasters brought on by climate change. These poems explore what happens when ancestral lands and family homes are gutted for years and sacred spaces become empty and unusable. The poems lay bare the threads that hold us together when everything else is gone. Part love song and part elegy, do not destroy this explores why people keep returning to places like Lake Charles.
The Sabine Series in Literature, No. 15
About the Author :
A native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Taylor Clement is a writer, poet, and researcher. She earned her Ph.D. at Florida State University where she studied Renaissance poetry and visual culture. Her work has been featured in Renaissance Studies and Word & Image. She teaches professional writing and editing courses at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Review :
"What a timely and important book Taylor Clement has written, a poetic chronicle of the harrowing experiences of living through disaster after disaster in the threatened landscape of Louisiana. Her voice is powerfully genuine, and her eye for detail unwavering. I couldn't put the book down." —Sheryl St. Germain, Louisiana Writer of the Year, 2018
"Taylor Clement's do not destroy this offers both a plea and an elegy for the hurricane-cursed land of South Louisiana. Exquisitely piercing in their craft and sentiment, these poems make a habitable place for grace amid climate destruction. This powerful collection proves that family and love can endure even the coast's steady encroachment, that memory can be preserved through story."—Amy Fleury, Author of Sympathetic Magic and Beautiful Trouble
"In Taylor Clement's do not destroy this the line is a kind of remembering that shimmers like heat. Where we remember that gulf means both the fullness of the ocean and the rift of loss. From an undersea microphone that measures the strength of hurricanes to the Cone of Uncertainty, from a chlorine plant fire to caskets washed away after Hurricane Laura, Clement documents the historic flooding and the aftermath of hurricanes in Southwest Louisiana. In these poems, a father works pouring hot asphalt, a mother plots hurricane paths on an old yellow map, and a family leaves their blue trailer in a rice field before Hurricane Andrew makes landfall. These poems know what it's like to love amidst uncertainty and devastation. 'i loved you when i first saw your knuckles', Clement writes. And in another poem: 'We would imagine each other as bodies / of water.' A beautiful collection."—Julia Koets, author of The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays, PINE, and Hold Like Owls
"The triumph of Taylor Clement's poems in do not destroy this is yoking the incorruptibility of love with whatever tests it. These poems are testaments to sacred love, erotic love, familial love, love of place, and the complex network of affections to everything we live by and live through. The THIS in Clement's powerful work is Love itself." —Darrell Bourque, Author of Until We Talk, Former Louisiana Poet Laureate
