This interview started via email a month into lockdown here in Charlottesville, VA. Tess had agreed to correspond with me from her home in El Cerrito, CA, well before the public suspected COVID-19 would make landfall in the U.S., and its arrival stateside delayed our dialogue. I sent her the first question on April 4th. I wanted to talk to Tess about her work in part because not long ago I’d moved to this town where her father’s family has deep roots, and because her first book, The Forage House, confronts and reckons with her ancestors’ participation in Virginia’s plantation economy. With each subsequent book, Taylor has turned her attention to new subjects and poetic modes without ever losing sight of history, document, context—her second book, Work and Days, employs an ecopoetic form of the georgic, while her third book, Last West, explores documentary poetics through an ekphrastic examination of Dorothea Lange’s California photographs and notebooks. And with her fourth book, Rift Zone, Taylor returns to questions of race, place, reckoning, and conscience, though this time the poems are situated in the El Cerrito of her childhood. I sent Tess the final question the morning of May 26th, not long after which the video of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police went viral and, as Tess suggests in her final answer, prompted Black and indigenous activists in nearby Richmond, VA, to tear down statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and of Christopher Columbus.
—Brian Teare