Rift Zone

RIFTZONE,Taylor's much-anticipated fourth book traces literal and metaphoric fault lines-riftsbetweenpastandpresent, childhoodandadulthood, 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 readher home state's historic violenceagainstour world's currentunsteadinesses-masseviction,housingcrises,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.