RIFT ZONE “Longlisted for the Believer Book Award in Poetry”
rift zone
An evocative excavation of a deeply fractured landscape, at once vast and granular, startlingly observant and relentlessly curious
Rift Zone, Taylor’s anticipated third 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 landgrant, 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—American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startingly observant, relentlessly curious—a fearsome tremor of a book.
Praise for Rift Zone
RIFT ZONE “Longlisted for the Believer Book Award in Poetry”
“simmering, shattering beauty” — Boston Globe on RIFT ZONE: Best Books of 2020, Best Poetry of 2020
—Boston Globe
"Taylor examines what it means to live close to the edge....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. An important book to consider and savor."'
—Library Journal, starred review
"I’m drawn into Tess Taylor’s “Rift Zone,” a collection about the violence and contradiction at the heart of California. I’ve read it through twice and it’s brilliant."
—The LA Times
"In Taylor’s stunning new book, Rift Zone, we are faced with the unsteadiness of our current universe, the many 'minor scales' unfurling inside our days, as well as ways of feeling connected through time and trouble."—Naomi Shihab Nye,
—The New York Times Magazine
"California: pastoral, urban, suburban—home to myth and magic. Taylor’s book is geologic in concept and theme, both panoramic and particular....Taylor hits the fine note of how nostalgia evolves into worry and lament."
—The Millions
“Taylor understands she is living at the edge of what might be a great gulf, in the face of what might be called precarity—of her own life, of people around her, of the geologic earth, of the planet as we know it. To simply recognize this in America today is no small thing. To write the kind of work that actually maps this gulf is special.”
“The poet for our moment.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
“In Rift Zone, Tess Taylor’s brilliant third 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, Bright Dead Things
“A haunting American elegy.”
—Jonathan Lethem
“Taylor gives voice to all that the golden state has tried to repress and erase, and in these moving, beautiful poems she reveals the pain, danger, and beauty that persists at the edge of the world.”
—Edan Lepucki
“Taylor has an eye for hidden histories, and the way unreconciled violences of the past continue to shape our collective and individual consciousness… Rift Zone pans California’s geological, historical, and legal fault lines, showing how the Bay Area’s socio-political schisms are rooted in — in fact, born from — a volatile landscape, reflecting the precariousness of our wider moment.
(Here are ) the tensions Taylor holds in her writing: the historic yet emergent loss, an impossibility to lineate, make sense of, and sing amid the greater harshness. A fault line, then, is at once a figure of destruction and a revelation. Its ruptures are simultaneously destructive and productive. “What is life for but explanation?” writes Taylor, as she pursues the uncomfortable and unsettling truths of her home.”
— JinJin Xu
"Energy builds line over line, mimicking the physical buildup of pressure beneath our feet that will eventually cause the ground itself to shift, while images reverberate like aftershocks throughout the work. These poems seek to create not only space in which to dwell within the fissure, but also to reassemble the pieces."
"Evidence of rift is everywhere, and yet these poems look not just to ruin but to reassembly. What is it to gaze at the point of rupture and will the wound to heal itself?"
"Perhaps we are unsettled. Perhaps poetry offers a language by which we may become, if not settled, at least stable in the unsettling that binds us each along, across, through, and out of the fault lines we must inevitably face. And still there is hope."
—Colorado Review, Abigail Chabitnoy