Tess Taylor, a member of the Ashland University MFA program’s Poetry faculty, will start her one-year term as El Cerrito poet laureate on April 1. She will be helping to build El Cerrito High School’s literary magazine.
Read MoreEast Bay Times: El Cerrito names acclaimed writer Taylor its 2024 poet laureate
Longtime educator, Tess Taylor, says she hopes to connect local students with Bay Area’s wider literary community.
Read MoreTess Taylor Selected to Serve as the El Cerrito's Fourth Poet Laureate
El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor was selected to serve as the City's fourth Poet Laureate during Arts and Culture Commission meeting on February 26, 2024.
Read MoreNina Burokas Reviews "Leaning Toward Light"
Nina Burokas reviews "Leaning Toward Light" through Raven Chronicles Press
Read MoreEcoTheo Collective 2024 AWP Off-Site Gathering
Poet Tess Taylor (59:15) reading with EcoTheo Collective 2024 AWP Off-Site Gathering
With Tiana Clark, Traci Brimhall, Jason Myers, Francisco Aragón, Ciona Rouse, and Maya Popa
Read MoreThe Wildstory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by The Native Plant Society of New Jersey
Poet Tess Taylor (2:10) speaks with Ann Wallace about her new anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, 2023) and the ability of poems to carry us through the seasons of planting, tending, grieving, harvesting, sharing in a world filled with both joy and crisis. We reflect on the deliberate cultivation of happiness as a discipline, and at the end of our conversation, we spend some time with Tess’s most recent solo collection, Rift Zone, published in 2020 by Red Hen Press.
Read MoreThe Marginalian: Favorite Books of 2023
The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them. Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”
Read MoreBerkleyside: 9 new books with Berkeley links to read this fall
A novella steeped in nostalgia for the heyday of Berkeley cinema, a novel written during a BART commute, a report on the young men killed by football and a garden poem anthology are among the recent books with Berkeley ties.
Read MoreEdible East Bay: Poems for the Gardener and the Cook
Book review by Kristina Sepetys
As poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil explains in her forward to Leaning Toward Light: Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them, the word anthology means “gathering of flowers,” and indeed, that is what the book’s editor, El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor, has done in a collection that celebrates the impulse to tend and nurture.
Read MoreAlta: Bound Together 2023: Poetry
14 new books of poetry are featured in this exciting guide, including titles from Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, and Matthew Zapruder.
Read MoreSpirituality & Health: “Books We Love 2023”
Sept/Oct. Issue
LEANING TOWARD LIGHT: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them by Tess Taylor. Bring this outside along with your trowel and gloves—Taylor has curated a poetry anthology about the healing power of gardening and connecting with the earth.
Read MoreGreenfield Recorder: Get Growing
Poet Tess Taylor reading from anthology of garden poems at Amherst College
All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening. That’s a shame, because garden poetry, a venerable tradition, offers insight and inspiration to gardeners everywhere.
Read MoreDaily Hampshire Gazette: “Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun
Gardens, like poetry, have restorative powers: Poet Tess Taylor reads from new anthology of garden poems Sept. 19 at Amherst College
All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening.
Read MoreTerrain: One Poem By Ada Limón from Leaning Toward Light
Trying
I’d forgotten how much
I like to grow things, I shout
to him as he passes me to paint
the basement. I’m trellising
Read MoreTerrain: One Poem By Victoria Chang from Leaning Toward Light
Spring Planting
Today I plant bougainvillea and hyacinth. Tomorrow, crocus
and candied pansies.
I am gardening, but my mind is tilling. The crows enter my yard.
They remind me of ink slabs
Terrain: One Poem By Mark Doty from Leaning Toward Light
Deep Lane
When I’m down on my knees pulling up wild mustard
by the roots before it sets seed, hauling the old ferns
further into the shade, I’m talking to the anvil of darkness:
Read MoreTerrain: One Poem By Danusha Laméris from Leaning Toward Light
Working in the Garden, I Think of My Son
Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash
dissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the air
on the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetected
Read MoreTerrain: One Poem by Robert Hass from Leaning Toward Light
The Marginalian: “Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden”
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden.
Read MoreLitHub: 20 new books out today!
The wheel of the year is turning, as it always does, beginning its slow shift from summer to the fall. If you’re unsure of how to spend the last days of August, rest assured that even if seasons always shift, one constant you can rely on is that there will always be new books to look forward to. Below, you’ll find twenty new titles to consider picking up to curl up with on these last days of August: fiction that ranges from philosophically complex to comfortingly comedic; poems on the transcendent power of nature and gardening; nonfiction on mavericks, murder, misogyny, mother tongues, and marijuana magazines; and much, much more.
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