Virtual Poetry Salon with Tess Taylor

I’ve always liked fierce poems and feminist poems, but it wasn’t that long ago that I noticed how many of the poetry collections I like best are deeply grounded in place. In Tess Taylor’s new collection, Rift Zone, that place is California in a century perched on a fault line. Taylor writes of suburbs that bury violent histories, and also how that violence keeps erupting and threatening to upend today’s polluted prettiness. There’s an apocalyptic Plathian verve to some of Taylor’s similes: “My parents renovated that old home. / It is clean as a lobotomy.” There’s resonant music, too, with some of the poems framed as songs and lullabies, and others just prickling with echoed sound: “The air rings with lost force we call the waves.” I hope you’ll read the book, the interview below, and the poem Taylor links to in the last line. It will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine, a physical copy of which I cherish over tea every Sunday morning. Is that another precarious pleasure? How long will our luxuries last?

1. If you were ordering thematically appropriate refreshments for this shindig, what would they be?

Broken cookies cracked apart by seismic pressure.

2. If, after your breathtaking reading and the subsequent standing ovation, a friend pulled you into a curtained window seat and asked, “How are you really?” or “Are you able to write these days?”, what might you answer?

I would say I am horribly sad and that some days I cannot even bear it. I would say writing a book of poems about the precarity of our lives in this brutal era only to have the era be too precarious for the poems has been staggering. I would say that beauty and song have a nagging way of sneaking up on me despite my rage and grief. I would say: I am waking up at midnight and keeping a raw insomniac’s journal. I would say I feel unkempt and also deeply alive. I would say “thank you so much for asking.”

3. How can your virtual audience find out more?

There is a lot up at www.tess-taylor.com!

A virtual reading here: 
https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/virtual-poetry-reading?fbclid=IwAR0oiHkMHdUk8LHonRo3CAWe5unQbxzS07h715aifPM8eK3N-Nf349hcnlU

And:  Here’s a stalwart defense of reading books NOW –  which you may like. 

And:  here’s a poem from the NYT Mag to send you into the weekend.