Work and Days

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.

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).