Rift Zone

by Tess Taylor

Overview

RIFT ZONE, Taylor’s much-anticipated fourth book 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 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—an 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097765
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	1,120,732
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

The San Francisco Chronicle hailed Tess Taylor’s first book, The Forage House, as “stunning.” Critic Stephanie Burt called Work & Days, her second book, “our moment’s Georgic,” and it was named one of the ten best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Taylor’s poetry and nonfiction appear widely; she chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle and is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered. She was a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s Universityin Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Anne Spencer Writer in Residence at Randolph College. Taylor grew up and lives in El Cerrito, California.

Table of Contents

Introduction 13

Preface: Pocket Geology 23

I

Del Norte 27

Sixth Grade, 1988 28

Song with Schist & County Line 30

Berkeley in the Nineties 38

Three Dreams, 2018 41

Song with Shag Rug & Wood Paneling 44

Song with Sequoia & Australopithecus 45

II

Song with Pneumonia & Telemann 49

California Suites 51

Downhill White Supremacists March on Sacramento 56

Song with Habitat Exchange 57

Year of Drought & Protests 59

Cardboard & Aria, 2011 60

Around the Hotsy Totsy 62

February, Rain 64

Valley Girl & Paramount, 1988 66

Handgun & Tetherball, 1990 69

Notes on a Diebenkorn 71

III

Apocalypto w/ Aquaria 75

Breach & Wake 76

Song with Poppies & Reverie 77

Emeline at Six Weeks 79

Untitled with Sadness & Suckle 80

Train Through Colma 81

IV

Raw Notes for a Poem Not Yet Written 85

Once Again at Nonviolence Training, 2017 87

Loma Prieta, 1989 88

Song in Which We Yet Sidestep Disaster 90

Elk at Tomales Bay 92

Etymology with Tectonic Plates 94

Song with Wild Plum & Thorn 96

Aubade with Faultline & Broken Pipe 98

Aubade with Redwood 99

I Gave My Love A Story 100

Punctuations & Wind 101

In Olema 103

V

Envoi: San Francisco 107

Editorial Reviews

02/17/2020

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

The poet for our moment.” —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

“In Rift Zone, Tess Taylor’s brilliant fourth collection, we encounter a magisterial range of subjects, from the geologic to the civic to the intimately personal. This book is a confident poetic engagement with the vital issues of our time, including the disastrous consequences of human activity on our climate, and its effect on the public and private spheres. Rooted in the shifting California landscape, this elegiac yet hopeful book is a necessary addition to the corpus of work dedicated to grieving the world as we know it.” —Ada Limón, author of The Carrying

"Reading Tess Taylor’s book as one sequence, which I highly recommend, is like taking a long walk with a vivid friend. Her voice falls in a steady rain of memory and witness, calling an entire landscape to life. 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

“Part natural history, part social history, part personal history, part prayer, the poems in Rift Zone are lit by a Northern Californian light that will both soothe and sear our hearts.” —Camille T. Dungy, author of Trophic Cascade

“Taylor has an eye for hidden histories, and the way unreconciled violences of the past continue to shape our collective and individual consciousness.” —JinJin Xu, Los Angeles Review of Books

“In this volume of poetry, you’ll find a wide range of emotion, deep sensitivity, and strong reactions. In a way she speaks for those of us who speak out but are seldom heard, who don’t know what to say, or are crowded out by louder, more forceful voices.” —Tammy Ruggles, Reader Views

"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—an 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." —Point Reyes Books

From the Publisher

★ 06/01/2020

In her third volume of poems (following Work & Days), NPR online poetry reviewer Taylor examines what it means to live close to the edge, both symbolically and in the real world. Growing up on the Hayward Fault, near El Cerrito, CA, she knows what it's like to live on the edge, whether she's surviving the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 or raising children in a country and a world that seem on the verge of collapsing underfoot: "Below us the crust is molten, is nationless.// We light only our lamps on the rift." Conversational and sometimes personal, Taylor's verse always comes across as fresh and lyrical. She includes poems built on fragments that reflect what it might feel like to have the earth shift beneath you—"We are animal/ in the broken ecosystem"—even as she offers readers another look at what's broken beneath us. Here, readers encounter rampant violence, the "war" at the border, and issues of ecology and equity, and she asks us to consider the large questions and small: "Even in the face// of devastation// we must make art. VERDICT An important book to consider and savor. [See "Versifying," LJ 1/20.]—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

Library Journal