In mapping our coming and going, Jo Taylor gives us a nuanced portrait of a place, the rural Midwest, shows a fiction writer’s feeling for people and character, and creates a music that lodges her imagery in our memory. Her explorations of place open into a vision of the ruins of time, the advances of change, and the coming darkness of death, yet she has the poet’s eye and ear to sing that the wind whispers alleluia through the reeds, / wild geese whine an alto chorus.

Norbert Krapf
former Indiana Poet Laureate

In How to Come and Go, Jo Barbara Taylor illuminates lessons learned from a life weighed carefully through astute observation. With an artisan’s hand, she skillfully crafts lyrical and memorable poems that sing of the Midwest, from the scent of baled hay to a day’s ritual of training horses in a stable. Reflecting on childhood mistakes, she reenacts school episodes that opened her eyes to a human being’s obligation to strive for a dignified existence. Taylor offers her readers an abundance of wisdom in this tightly woven collection of poems, rich in sculpted images and metaphors.

Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda
Virginia Poet Laureate Emerita, 2006 -2008