Acclaimed American poet Tess Taylor responds to Dorothea Lange's
photography with a new work
In Last West, poet Tess Taylor follows Dorothea Lange's winding paths
across California during the Great Depression and in its immediate
aftermath. On these journeys, Lange photographed migrant laborers, Dust
Bowl refugees, tent cities and Japanese American internment camps.
Taylor's hybrid text collages lyric and oral histories against Lange's
own journals and notebook fragments, framing the ways social and
ecological injustices of the past rhyme eerily with those of the
present. The result is a stunning meditation on movement, landscape and
place.
"Scintillatingly rendered by Taylor as conversation, meditation, road
trip, and vivid documentary account, Last West tracks the
not-so-distant past into the erupting present, taking on as many poetic
forms as there are California topographies." -Forrest Gander, Chancellor
of the American Academy of Poets and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry