August 2, 2020

By Tess Taylor. Museum of Modern Art, 2020. 

In Last West, Tess Taylor follows Dorothea Lange’s 1935-1942 paths across California, journeys on which Lange photographed migrant laborers, carrot pickers, dust bowl refugees, tent camps, and the painful realities of Japanese internment. Taylor’s hybrid texts collage lyric and oral histories against Lange’s own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways the social and ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the present. The result is a stunning meditation on movement, landscape, and ...

By Tess Taylor. Red Hen Press, 2020. 

Rift Zone, Tess Taylor’s fourth book of poems, traces literal and metaphoric fault lines—rifts between past and present; childhood and adulthood; what is and what was. Circling Taylor’s hometown—an ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward fault—these poems unearth strata that include a Spanish landgrant; a bloody land grab; gun violence; valley girls, stripmalls; 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 ...