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Carey Taylor

Carey Taylor

Some Aid to Navigation


Carey Taylor was born in Bandon, Oregon, shortly after her parents moved into their first home, next door to the Port Orford Lifeboat Station. She grew up following her father’s Coast Guard career on the Oregon and Washington coasts, and had the good fortune to live at Point Wilson Lighthouse, Burrows Island Lighthouse, and Cape Arago Lighthouse as a child.

Some of her first memories are her view of the Garibaldi Boat House from her bedroom window at the Tillamook Coast Guard Station, helicopters landing in her front yard, and the persistent background wail of a foghorn. Her love of this western edge of the world has been an integral part of her identity and one of her greatest writing muses.

Carey is the author of The Lure of Impermanence (Cirque Press). She is the winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and runner-up for the Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award. She has been published in the United States, Ireland, and England. She has a Master’s Degree in School Counseling from Pacific Lutheran University.

Carey lives in Portland, Oregon. You can visit her website careyleetaylor.com.


Some Aid to Navigation: $19.99

Carey Taylor reading from Some Aid to Navigation

also featuring Glenna Cook

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Poem from Some Aid to Navigation

Where God Resides

At the top of Neahkahnie Mountain
I release us—ask the south wind

to carry our burdens,
beyond lingcod and dogfish.

I stopped scanning the bar for
my father’s boat years ago,

but on the dock I still pull crab pots
filled with his voice,

sometimes his face, once
the Pepé Le Pew tattoo on his calf

he tried to keep hidden from me.
I was so sure of who left who,

but this old coastal fog has blurred
things, left me alone with our bowed legs

and broad shoulders, a book about
a horse he gave me at fifteen,

chaps from that elk he hauled
off this mountain.

What else could I have done
but return to this western edge

we were our best in? To the dark
of Sitka spruce, where, in the smallest

shaft of light, we were sword fern unfurling
toward the blue-gray light.

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