Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
Description
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 PoetryProduct Details
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About the Author
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).
