Rift Zone
Poems
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"Brilliant . . . Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is . . . dedicated to grieving the world as we know it." —Ada Limón, author of The Carrying
This 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.
"Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts." —Publishers Weekly
"Unearthing and sifting the seismic layers of her own East Bay locale, she's created a haunting American elegy." —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the preface to the ambitious third book from Taylor (The Forage House), Ilya Kaminsky describes the work as "many investigations of American fear." While fear may be a subtext to these poems, they are an exploration of American violence and fragility, amplified by the fact that the poet lives in El Cerrito, Calif., a city that sits atop the Hayward Fault. Taylor's poems are often made up of multiple sections, in a controlled sprawl that mirrors the area about which she writes so richly. A descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Taylor explores her own identity, reminding readers of the foundation and origins of American violence. One poem opens with "Tonight the train shuts for another death./ Jumper: Third this month," and it is followed by another that begins "& after the vermillion opera curtain/ rose on Giovanni raping/ the tiny distant woman on the stage,/ we drank champagne at intermission." In these layered poems, Taylor often steps beyond herself to address her own privilege: "Sometimes I think that all/ privilege is/ is some safer vantage/ for watching the trauma, America, happen," she observes. Taylor vividly and memorably renders the complexities of an America of violence and rifts.
