What Screams Is Never Sound is not a collection you simply read-it is something you survive.
In this unflinching body of work, Damian Rondell Taylor pulls language out of places most people spend their lives avoiding: grief that never got a funeral, rage that learned how to whisper, and memories that refuse to stay buried. These poems do not ask for permission. They confront, expose, and demand to be felt.
Rooted in the lived realities of the Seven Cities and the emotional architecture of urban survival, this collection becomes a map of pressure-how it builds, how it breaks, and how, somehow, it shapes something stronger. Streets are not just places here; they are witnesses. Water remembers. Concrete teaches. And every silence carries the weight of something that once tried to scream.
Taylor's voice moves between raw confession and sharp observation, honoring those often reduced to statistics while restoring their humanity in vivid, unforgettable strokes. Sons, daughters, mothers, fathers-each page becomes a testimony of existence under strain, where love and loss share the same breath.
This is a book about what happens when pain has nowhere left to go but inward-and what it looks like when it finally finds a way out.
Blending poetry and creative nonfiction, What Screams Is Never Sound challenges the reader to sit with discomfort, to recognize the stories hidden beneath everyday survival, and to confront the truth that not all screams are heard-but they are always felt.
This is not just a collection of poems.
It is a reckoning
