RIFT ZONE, Taylor's much-anticipated fourth book traces literal and
metaphoric fault lines--rifts between past and present, childhood and
adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Taylor's hometown--an ordinary
California suburb lying along the Hayward fault--these poems unearth
strata that include a Spanish land grant, a bloody land grab, gun
violence, valley girls, strip malls, redwood trees, and the painful
history of Japanese internment.
Taylor's ambitious and masterful poems read her home state's historic
violence against our world's current unsteadinesses--mass eviction,
housing crises, deportation, inequality. They also ponder what it means
to try to bring up children along these rifts. What emerges is a
powerful core sample of America at the brink--an American elegy equally
tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious,
tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly
curious--a fearsome tremor of a book.