April and Back Again by Claire Taylor

An intimate year-in-poems capturing the joy and dread of getting older, growing a family, the world’s news … and the miracles—no bigger than a child’s hand—that keep us going.

• 106 pages
• ISBN 978-1-945028-73-1
• Publication date: February 24, 2026

About the Book

Midway through April and Back Again, Claire Taylor asks herself, “Where is the line between hope and stupidity?”

Read a sample poem

Tracking the final year of her thirties from April 2024 through April 2025, Claire Taylor’s debut poetry collection is an intimate portrait of loving and living against a backdrop of existential dread. Deftly oscillating between quotidian scenes of family life and the anxiety of raising children amid the realities of climate change, gun violence, and a democracy on the verge of demise, Taylor leads us through the ups and downs of a year that was history in the making. Simultaneously marveling at the magic of watching her children grow and witnessing the horror of a country going, literally and figuratively, down in flames, April and Back Again follows Taylor from the pleasures of life’s little moments into the growing depths of her own despair.

Full of quiet meditations, heartfelt introspection, and delightful hints of humor, April and Back Again is like the first hopeful signs of spring after a long, cold winter.

Advance Praise

“Claire Taylor’s poetry compels us to pause for tenderness against a backdrop of harsh and changing seasons and cycles around us, and I read through them like a wondrous child in a garden, plucking brilliant moments of joy. These poems left me yearning to grab hold of those soft marvels, to etch them into memory, before the next spring circles back on us.” —Annie Marhefka, author of Strangers We Know By Heart and Executive Director at Yellow Arrow Publishing

“‘So much has changed in the brief history of my living,’ writes Claire Taylor. ‘So much has stayed the same.’ In April and Back Again, Taylor tracks a year rife with the joys and sweet melancholy of parenthood (and life in general) in a troubled country. These poems cut through the curtain we keep drawn on our daily lives, and the result is marvelous. This book is a loving hug with an anxious heartbeat. We glimpse both romantic and familial love via jack-o-lanterns, depression, dinosaurs, baseball, and more as ‘time doubles back on itself / again and again.’” —Mitchell Nobis, author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees

“Claire Taylor tends to the seasons of her 39th year: ‘beneath all this dirt is / the quiet work of survival.’ In April and Back Again her poems navigate the shape and heat of motherhood and marriage, of her own smoldering inner landscape, and of a burning nation fraught with fear yet bursting with nature’s splendor. With vivid imagery and sharp honesty, Claire beautifully conveys the futility and significance of life’s crumblings and renewals. She speaks to the resiliency of our humanity, reminding us—as mothers, as lovers, as Earth dwellers—to ‘know enough / to greet each offering / as if it’s the last.’”
—Heather Brown Barrett, author of Water in Every Room

“In Claire Taylor’s marvelous collection of poems, April and Back Again, we are taken through the seasons of the calendar but also the seasons of this life: the springs of childbirth and nature’s awe, the summers of love and longing, the autumns of query and remembrance, the winters of illness and depression–and everything in between. In poems both elegiac and celebratory, Taylor maps the daily duties that define not just existing but living. On one hand, we interact with Mike Johnson, Chuck Knoblauch, and Rainer Maria Rilke and on the other we mourn the loss of a pet, we celebrate the growth of a child, we grieve the vulnerabilities of democracy, we feel the reassurance of tenderness. “I suppose some places aren’t places worth leaving,” writes Taylor. If by places she means this life, I’m in. If by places she means this book, then I could not agree more.” —Dean Rader, winner, T.S. Eliot Prize