The Fragile Human: A Review Of Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone And Last West, Roadsongs For Dorothea Lange

“Whose fault // our fault” the poem “Three Dreams, 2018” opens. Tess Taylor’s fourth collection of poems, Rift Zone, tenders to her reader the language of fault, rift and fracture as her songs and aubades touch upon the geological, ecological and political of our lives. 

Evoking California with poems set in Berkeley, Sacramento, and El Cerrito, Taylor carries her reader to place after place, from little hill, to quake, to peak. Sometimes the place is an event in time, as “Loma Prieta, 1989,” which features the earthquake of the same name that affected the San Francisco and Monterey Bay regions. In this poem, the speaker recounts:

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