Midnight Muse In A Convenience Store

Drawing from his own experiences, living and working in small town West Virginia, West Virginia Beat Poet Laureate Daniel McTaggart writes of the places he's been, the people he's met, and the experiences of his life.

Daniel's use of color and tone in this collection is exquisite, as he helps us see and hear the primal beauty of nature and invites us to consider human quirkiness manifested in a convenience store. We visit both places, do we not--stopping by to quench different thirsts? One quenched thirst to feed the soul, the other to feed the curiosity. Daniel's invited us in through his poems, and we'd best hurry into the experiences he's prepared for us.

-Cat Pleska, author Riding on Comets: a memoir

Daniel McTaggart writes like a philosopher meditating on the details of everything around him. He captures glimpses of the world as it flashes by, forcing the reader to stop with him and watch it pass. Midnight Muse in a Convenience Store is filled with wisdom and beauty. "Crumbling at the kindle of pallid sun / The bare bones of autumn gather," McTaggart writes in "Bones of Autumn," and we are there beside him in the chilly haze, counting the leaves, shielding our eyes from the light. In "Quick Whispers," he writes "Even from the register I saw flies / Turned on their backs, legs twiddling / Akimbo...," and we are with him in his little shop, both mourning and finding joy in the simplest things. McTaggart has the power to pull us into his life, and that's a winning formula for poetry.

-Ace Boggess, author of I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So and The Prisoners