Rift Zone

RIFT ZONE, Taylors much-anticipated fourth book traces literal and metaphoric fault linesrifts between past and present, childhood and adulthood, what is and what was. Circling Taylors hometownan ordinary California suburb lying along the Hayward faultthese 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. Taylors ambitious and masterful poems read her home states historic violence against our worlds current unsteadinessesmass 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 brinkan American elegy equally tuned to maternal and to geologic time. At once sorrowful and furious, tender and fierce, Rift Zone is startlingly observant, relentlessly curiousa fearsome tremor of a book.