Rachel Richardson, Tess Taylor + Kimberly Grey

Kimberly Grey, Rachel Richardson, and Tess Taylor read poems from their new collections.

About Kimberly Grey’s The Opposite of Light:

A revealing scrutiny of contemporary marriage; winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.
Can the notion of Romantic love withstand our endless postmodern moment? In these extraordinary poems, Kimberly Grey explores our abiding need for neatness, order, and symmetry in matrimony, considering our ideals for love and language in this digital age―its weightless, distracting, and inescapable pressures. She portrays the ways in which love reflects us back to ourselves: familiar but strange, predetermined but new. There is “a drop of blue light,” she writes. “But no high-tech way / to say you’re mine. No way to love / each other but with these ancient bodies.”

“In The Opposite of Light the rapid momentum of invention plays against extremities of feeling, system meeting sensation: “We keep inventing/ newfangled ways to be in the world” gives way to “No way to love each other/ but with these ancient bodies.” These poems are serious in their play, love poems in a world of interlocking technologies and language, tender buttons with a lot to say.  — Ken Fields

About Rachel Richardson’s Hundred-Year Wave:

In Rachel Richardson’s second collection of poems, she juxtaposes the grand quests of Ahab and Melville with the quotidian journeys of contemporary life. Hundred-Year Wave launches stories of marriage and motherhood over the currents of a nearly mythological ancestry: women and men who built their possessions out of iron and flour and whalebone and wool. If reaching back into the past is akin to plumbing a depth, then Richardson exhibits the rare abilities of craft to build, from our language, vessels light enough to travel on that element, but sturdy enough to weather the storms we are likely to find there.

“Rachel Richardson’s Hundred-Year Wave is a gorgeous book that borrows its vast subject matter from new parenthood, marriage, the ocean, whales, and Sylvia Plath. The poet knits each poem with such care—stitch by stitch, loop by loop, word after word into an effortless collection of quiet yet haunting music lush with texture and feeling. Her gifts are wide and deep like the ocean, as she shows us that ‘we are not lost/in the vast expanse of lostness.'” –Victoria Chang

About Tess Taylor’s Work and Days:

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. 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.

“Our moment’s Georgic.” –Stephen Burt