Taylor Mali

TAYLOR MALI is a spoken word poet, teacher advocate, and game designer from New York City. His poetry is both accessible and literary, and even though he was once told he was “just like Billy Collins except even worse,” Billy Collins himself calls Taylor Mali a “poet of unique properties whose performances are leavened by charm and wit.” Mali is a four-time National Poetry Slam champion and one of the original poets to appear on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. The author of five collections of poetry and a book of essays on teaching, he is also the inventor of Metaphor Dice, a game that helps writers think more figuratively. He lives in Brooklyn where he is the founding curator of the Page Meets Stage reading series at the Bowery Poetry Club.

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Poetry By Chance

Writers of all ages and levels of experience have been using Taylor Mali’s Metaphor Dice for years to explore and revel in the formulaic nature of metaphors. The game gives you a collection of three different concepts or language tools that create a metaphor, and it is up to the poet to fill in the rest of the poem based on their roll. Some metaphors work and some don’t. Some are immediately hilarious while others slowly reveal themselves to be astonishingly insightful. Poetry by Chance is the first collection of poems that were all prompted by different rolls of Metaphor Dice, featuring submitters from the inaugural Golden Die Contest.

After reading through this collection, you can’t help but see the power of metaphor in understanding the world around us. In this anthology there is no singular poetic style or voice, but rather a collection of unique voices and perspectives for each roll. With some deeply personal, and some widely universalizing, one thing is clear: these poems are the brainchild of an ingenious, yet simple, writing tool.

Praise for Poetry By Chance

Poetry is the tool we reach for when we know what we want to say, but not how to say it or even if it can even be put into words.
– Jared Singer, author of Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction

Figurative language should be taught backwards. Instead of explaining what metaphors are first and then demanding a few creative examples as proof of understanding, switch that order around. First offer up a thousand random examples of metaphors until you stumble on one that feels like it’s begging you to explore how it’s true and shows up in your experience.
— Taylor Mali, editor of Poetry By Chance: An Anthology of Poems Powered By Metaphor Dice

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Poetry By Chance

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