"In his Revealing Self in Pictures and Words, Tom Taylor (aka the marvelous Poet Spiel) has given us his magnum opus, a revelatory memoir unlike any other, brimming with breathtaking textual and explosive visual images. A son of the Great Plains, a farm boy already a budding artist, a maverick, and gay, we feel the excruciating strictures of the closeted 1940s. Taylor allows us entry to his beautifully rendered inner agonies and mirror-dancing pleasures. We are privy to his deepest secrets and grateful recipients of his lifetime accumulation of wisdom and advice. In gorgeous reproductions he shows us those first sketches of his cloistered farm world, and then like rings in a tree, we witness Taylor's growth as an artist. His vision is sometimes whimsical, sometimes realistic, and often wildly surrealistic as if Baudelaire and Rimbaud had painted as well as written. This book is for the coffee table and the ages." -Stephanie Dickinson. Author, Editor, Publisher._________________________ In his workplace, a new decision every day, this American artist and author follows his brush or his keyboard to wherever they dictate. Some days, he may skip a beat, or a few, to shoot off into territory he's not yet explored-try a new medium or change the spirit of his work from dark to enlightened, from decorative to heavy abstractions. No subject or style is off limits for him. Art has been Taylor's vehicle for expression of weighty feelings and the lifting of burdens. He uses art and art uses him. When life seems unbearable, he makes art about it. He finds his voice where those feelings might otherwise begin to stink and fester. At the heart of each of us lies a universal voice. And as private as it may seem, each time we re-discover it, we KNOW when we are there. BUT its rationale may seem frightening because it feels risky and unfamiliar-because we expend so little commitment in our lives to just allow it to express. But not everyone finds their voice so they echo the voice of others, no matter how small or large, how explicit or vague, how humane or inhumane.