Sympathetic Viper
© 2023 Owen Scott Taylor
ISBN: 978-1-944234-52-2
Trade paperback | Poetry
What started as a drunken conversation with the publishers (and longtime co-conspirators) at Last Word Press about the decline of modern poetry at a grimy Olympia dive bar well over a decade ago has now resulted in (finally) this brazen collection of “stupid heart poems & other such nonsense.” Presented here in these poems is a portrait of a man of many contradictions: weary traveler, tender miscreant, drunken brawler & above all, a certified heavy-equipment operator with a heart of fool’s gold. Here is a life lived out of a backpack, on the run, forever seeking adventure, public transit schedules, basking in the quiet solitude & reflection long journeys provide after the fires of passion are doused in tequila & the sobering sunrise. Sympathetic Viper brings together 15 years of loosely- based “romantic/heartbreak” poems from Owen Scott Taylor, who once claimed to be the Kelly Slater of Couch-Surfing.