Work & Days

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).

"It’s wonderfully carnal, that savoring that carries all the way into darkness . . . The opposite of error, here, is not correctness—it’s life, and the hunger for life, for the vegetables that turn dark soil and the day’s 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 acts—to grow, harvest, mourn—still remain central to lyric utterance. Is such a pastoral sensibility possible in the mediated world of 21st century American life? Taylor’s 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 apocalypse—whether ecological disaster, or global political chaos—draws 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 Taylor’s 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 project—the wages of war, labor, ecological violence—is revealing yet further urgent contexts for poetry.”—Barnes & Noble Review