Today in the Taxi

About Today in the Taxi

Today in the Taxi is a book about my experiences driving a taxi in New York City. 

I drove for nearly six years, from 2014 until 2020, working as an independent contractor for ride sharing companies like Uber, Lyft, Juno, and Via.

Each of the poems in the book begins with a variation of the phrase “today in the taxi,” and each poem describes an actual trip, as it happened. Over the course of the book, this frame establishes a rhythm that serves to reveal the variation of each trip and its metaphors. 

There are three “main characters” in the book: American bassist and composer Charles Mingus (1922-1979), German-Jewish writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924), and the Lord, who is a female voice. They appear alongside my real-life passengers. The city is seen from the perspective of the driver—me—but the voices of Mingus, Kafka, and the Lord serve as guides, an ethical GPS, allowing the reader to bear witness along with the driver. 

I hope the reader finds ways to connect their memories of New York City—its street grid, and strange inhabitants—with the trips in the taxi I describe. I hope the reader sees the drivers as complex people and not invisible parts of a machine to bring them to their destination. 

I hope the reader feels a connection to the driver, the way he thinks and relates to the city moving all around him as his car moves through it; and feels compassion for the strangeness of people, their quirks and idiosyncrasies. I hope the reader understands there are metaphors and poems all around us, even in the most commonplace or mundane exchanges.

— Sean Singer, 2021

PRAISE for Today in the Taxi

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity's intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page.—Tyehimba Jess

This book burns like trash on rooftops. It runs the river of me like a ribbon through its streets. It makes great sense. It makes no sense... Today in the Taxi makes for a terrific intellectual and spiritual companion. A must-read for poetry lovers, this book is also a game changer for prose poetry.”—Cate Marvin

Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is, and the many ways the poetic renews and re-defines itself outside of the parameters of the accepted and familiar. In this way his books are startlingly alive, Like his previous work, Today in the Taxi is anchored in the conviction that the world outside the writer's imagination is as radical and pressing as anything within--the writing becomes a collage of outer fact and receiving, wondering mind. I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Edington to an anonymlous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world--at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebal’s The Rings of Saturn. Whitman offered that the true poet does not “trouble himself about his ornaments or fluency.” The genuine finds its language elsewhere. Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey & Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.—Laurie Sheck

In Today in the Taxi, Sean Singer has accomplished, with remarkable succinctness, an amazing number of things: he has reinvented the picaresque for the 21st century; he has created a poetic form, the major component of which is the automobile; and he has conceived a narrator who is both Spenserian and Kafkaesque—all in stark, spare language as convincingly conversational as it is literary in the best sense of the word. The cabbie with whom the reader rides is a contemporary Red Crosse Knight, an Unfortunate Traveler of the magical and terrifying landscape of Manhattan, a brilliantly sentient observer, a Good Samaritan, and just a human being who moves the lives of others and moves through them, ordinary as any man, or woman--an angel, brushing terrifying and numinous moments with a burning wing. “The vehicle is not just a way to get to the crime,” Singer writes, “but somehow to bless whatever the journey needs.”—T.R. Hummer

Read Michael Bazzett’s review of Today in the Taxi in American Poetry Review