You don't need a classroom to be a teacher, and you don't need to be a teacher to help someone learn a lesson. Taylor Mali's poetry explores this truth in entertaining and plainspoken ways because "the last thing this world needs is another poem" ("The Call to What We Know"). Whether discussing the language of love or the love of language, the poems contained in The Last Time As We Are prove that "He who dares to teach must never cease to learn."

With the perfect blend of wit, eloquence, and honesty, Taylor Mali's poems delight, haunt, and illuminate with equal measure every subject they celebrate. Bouquet of Red Flags is laced with more than the typical LSD (love, sex, divorce) of modern poetry. Here lie poems that elevate the overlooked daily miracles of coincidence ("The Luck I Crave") as well as the blessings of loss and longing ("Love as a Form of Diving"). Whether employing form or rhyme or merely crafting the artful prose he is known for, Taylor Mali delivers entertaining epiphanies spiced with the "Deepest Condiments."

"Not since Taylor Mali, has there been a poet of the likes of Taylor Mali-which is to say he is a man of unique properties. He is tagged as a performance poet, but his performances, rather than being frontal assaults, are leavened by charm and wit and could survive happily on the page." -Billy Collins, United States Poet Laureate "Mr. Mali is a ranting comic showman and literary provocateur..." -The New York Times The stars were aligned that night in the exact middle of the 60's when Taylor Mali came into this world. He is doing what he was born to do: a poet-warrior carrying into the present age all that youthful Promethean rebellion and titanic creative energy, now radically fused with the crucial discipline and authority of the true teacher. "He who cannot obey himself will be commanded," said Nietzsche, and thus too speaks Taylor Mali, while laughing. -Richard Tarnas, Professor of Philosophy and Cultural History at the California Institute of Integral Studies, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

Called "a ranting comic showman and a literary provocateur" by The New York Times, Taylor Mali writes eloquently and entertainingly about his experiences in and out of the middle school classroom. Bob Holman, the man who brought the poetry slam to New York City, calls Mali's poems "clear, funny, appealing, accessible. And smart." "What Learning Leaves" includes many of Mali's greatest hits, including "Like Lilly Like Wilson," "Totally L Whatever," and "What Teachers Make," which has been viewed on YouTube over five million times and is called "the most forwarded poem in the world."