Work & Days

(Paperback)

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In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor--outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child--found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, "methamphetamine and global economic crisis," these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets--Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare--Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century.

Reviews

"Its wonderfully carnal, that savoring that carries all the way into darkness . . . The opposite of error, here, is not correctnessits life, and the hunger for life, for the vegetables that turn dark soil and the days light into sweetness . . . and for our own conversions, too . . ."
Slate.com

"Taylor contemplates the invisible threads that tie the individual body to the numerous bodies scattered across the planet . . . Taylor's engagement with the poetry of agriculture reveals a deep sense of humility and a newfound gratitude for life itself."
Publishers Weekly

. . . a book . . . of great immersion, in both landscape and thought.
Kirkus Reviews

"(This) lapidary, moving book . . . shows that across thousands of years, these smallest actsto grow, harvest, mournstill remain central to lyric utterance. Is such a pastoral sensibility possible in the mediated world of 21st century American life Taylors answer is not only yes, but to focus on the thousands of workers both here and abroad who live a life based on laboring with the earth. These subtle poems, like those that explore her lineage to the Jefferson family in her first book, are not without harder-to-confront agonies. As she draws the world... proximate to touch, the intuited sense of apocalypsewhether ecological disaster, or global political chaosdraws closer . . . (as well.)
LitHub's 30 Poets You Should be Reading

". . . in an era when distraction endlessly beckons from tiny screens in the palms of our hands, [Taylor] says farming can help reconnect us to the world."
The Salt @ NPR

". . . with [Taylor's] consciousness, evocative and redolent of the hard sensory clarity of the earth, come also intimations of apocalyptic time as much around the world as here at home."
LitHub

". . . we feel her muscles singing."
Library Journal

"Tess Taylors poetry . . . points to her craft and artifice . . . in preternatural lyrics about the cycle of the seasons (with) austere, resonant and sometimes terrifying subjects . . . formal, darkling poems . . . her projectthe wages of war, labor, ecological violenceis revealing yet further urgent contexts for poetry.
Barnes & Noble Review

"Tess Taylor's second book of poems offers a series of deliberate lyrics, lyrics as deliberationstendings and attendings in a Hesiodic and Virgilian key: here I work a plot that also grounds. This is a book both grounded and worldly, alert to the smallest pecks a bird might make and to the drones and bombs the US dispatches in the names of its citizens. The shape of a day, a year, a life; the press of mortality; the clutch of soil; the specific angles of light in each season: Work and Days takes the measure of a contemporary life anchoring itself, provisionally, in a farming year. The beauty here co-exists with rot, ripeness with blight. Taylor's poems are lean, her imagination and reckoning rich. The turn of the plow offers one of the oldest images of the turnings of verse: Taylor's poems carve their own furrow in our common soila line between wanting and getting, working and hoping, learning and failing, losing and making. This is a severe, attentive book, paradoxically lush in its very stringencies. Despite all, a throaty world sings ripen."
Maureen McLane

Work & Days is our moments georgic, our lyric book about labor and retreat, security and greenness, a book with a thousand leeks to plant and also a lament, in cello tones . . . It is not coming back. It is vividly seen but also full of open space: Taylor invites us . . . into a seasonal cycle thats not what it was, that reflects a changing earth, but one that nevertheless looks back to antiquity fully persuaded that its traditions are here for us too.
Stephen Burt

Taylor is geologically, biologically, and morally alert. With a naturalists painterly and wide-open gaze, she includes crises of war and environment alongside the actual, detailed labors of greenhouse and field. This book presents the knowledge of labor in many forms: its ripening in gardens and farms, culture and birth-giving, an inseparable part of our days broader makings within the chapped farmhouse that houses our hard-won, shared fates amid the existence of all.
Jane Hirshfield

Author Bio

Tess Taylor grew up in El Cerrito, California, and attended Berkeley High School. She moved east to go to Amherst College, but took a leave of absence to work as a cook's assistant and translator in Paris. When she came back, she double-majored in English and Urban Studies, ran a gardening program for youth in Berkeley, and interned at Chez Panisse. After college, Tess moved to Brooklyn and worked as a journalist while attending NYU's journalism school. She covered (and still covers) arts, books, food, architecture and the urban environment for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other venues. Tess has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and The MacDowell Colony. Her work appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The Believer, Boston Review, Guernica, Literary Imagination, The Threepenny Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. As the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident, Tess worked on a small farm while she lived and wrote at the house of poet Amy Clampitt in Lenox, Massachusetts. After seventeen years away, Tess lives again in El Cerrito. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her first book of poems is The Forage House (Red Hen Press, 2013).