New Poetry That Excavates the Past to Imagine a Future
By Kathryn Nuernberger
Tess Taylor’s is an important voice in an emerging body of work from white poets excavating the histories of whiteness and privilege, who seek to understand precisely how these ideas were first created and then maintained through willful ignorance. This book provides excellent examples of how white poets can participate in the project of decolonization and liberation without culturally appropriating or enacting a white savior complex. As someone who recognizes how my own poems have sometimes failed in these ways, I’m grateful to see models for writing the archive of white privilege and systemic racism in a way that allows white readers to imagine what being a good ancestor might look like from their subject positions.