It’s like Ryan Taylor is the present tense. He’s a space and time for a country that feels like a planet. Or “America” is so all-encompassing to his life in ”American Planet”, it might as well be a planet, or America is so presumptive about the world around it, it would just as well name the planet America. Like a father or a patriarchy of men or the feeling when you remember you’re father was a man, and you’re also a man, and it was a man who renamed important things after America. Like are you worried about when the word "North" might be seen as an offense in the name “North America.” Who was the dummy to put the “North” in front of "America”? And now we have to start living on the America America continent?

Don’t worry. This isn't what Ryan Taylor has proposed or exaggerated into. But he’s interested in the male authority that comes when a man dismisses something. Dismissal is a slick rhetorical gesture, you might be familiar with it in 2026. Dismissing, like a whole television news coverage that’s just filthy with people making rude comments then dismissing the very premise of wanting to comment. And they’re so rude doing it! That’s what dismissal is in 2026. A doubling of rudeness. That’s where Ryan Taylor is in this poem. The poet in “American Planet” has father issues. He literally calls his father a “son of a bitch.” But with relish. It sounds so good to call him that he repeats it a few times.

Now take the rhetorical impact of dismissal and add to it a series of wild poetic assertions. And attach those to the poet’s body. Like imagine each assertion is a suction cup whose emphasis is like the devices Tom Cruise used for climbing that tower in Dubai in Mission Impossible — Ghost Protocol. In “American Planet,” the poet has exaggerated himself into the fungal networks, and the 7-year-old version of himself cloned for 2025, and the 3-D printout of a girl’s soul that that boy can fall in love with. Jesus Christ. Like whatever tone of voice you take the Lord’s name in vain, that’s the emphaticalness, the emphasis, and the exaggerated telepathy of this poem’s vocal range. Aimed directly at that “son of a bitch” father. The mythos of a father and, given the poet’s outrage, there’s a good chance it’s the poet’s real father.

Should we feel bad for a son that has such an exacting poetic justice at his command. To take that father down. To realize the complicated feelings he has for his father, who was such a “son of a bitch,” who still has the audacity to claim this son on his W-2. Is it possible for father issues like this to find an adequate description of God, given the popular framing of God as “Father”? Let's just say tautology has nothing on Ryan Taylor reporting his intention to identify and biography himself. Which I think of as the whole engine of this poem. “My biography as a contrasting portrait of the portrait I made of my father.” Could be a line in this poem. But instead, Taylor declares a series of declarative “I am” statements that bleed into contexts and world views. “I am writing a series / of romance novels.” Or “I am falling in love with / the aircraft carrier, / the local deity.”

Some of these things you could imagine seeing on a certain news program that treats the news more as “news." Or when Jerry Springer was making news by being an ass hole. What role does an absent father have if the father keeps drawing upon his son’s life as an ambiguous fact ambiguously related to his own? Who in God’s name is Janet that the poet would lean on her life as a landing mat for these declarative statements about his life? There is no end to sourcing in Ryan Tayler’s declarative power. That’s the fun!