Böcker av Tess Taylor

A poet hailed as "stunning" reveals a fierce and sensual intelligence in a meditation about farming, reproducing, and what it means to try to forge a relationship with the earth.

"In this new poetry anthology, Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world"--

"e;Brilliant . . . Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is . . . dedicated to grieving the world as we know it."e; -Ada Limon, author of The CarryingThis collection of poems traces literal and metaphoric fault lines-rifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Tess Taylor's hometown-an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault-these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful history of Japanese internment.Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic violence against our world's current unsteadinesses-mass eviction, housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink-equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curious-a fearsome tremor of a book."e;Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy."e; -Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective

"In Last West, poet Tess Taylor follows Dorothea Lange's winding paths across California during the Great Depression and in its immediate aftermath. On these journeys, Lange photographed migrant laborers, Dust Bowl refugees, tent cities, and Japanese American internment camps. Taylor's hybrid text collages lyric and oral histories against Lange's own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways social and ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the present. The result is a stunning meditation on movement, landscape, and place"--