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 it means to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a powerful core sample of America at the brink—American elegy 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’s Rift Zone takes California’s position on a fault line seriously, investigating the fracturing of contemporary America against older rifts—both geologic and social. In their starred review, Library Journal wrote, “Taylor examines what it means to live close to the edge . . . An important book to consider and savor.” Rift Zone was also hailed as “brilliant” by Stephanie Danler in the LA Times and “stunning” by Naomi Shihab Nye in The New York Times.