Join us for a night of poetry cultivating our collective urge to grow, tend, and heal, and to help launch Tess Taylor’s new poetry anthology Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them. Alongside acclaimed poets Mariana Goycoechea, Haleh Liza Gafori, Erika Meitner, and Sophie Cabot Black, Taylor invites gardeners, caretakers, poets, and readers alike to a magical night Hudson Valley Writers Center to indulge in poetry readings to celebrate this beautiful collaboration of some of the most imaginative contemporary poets of our time celebrating the life giving diversity of gardens.
About the book:
Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace, and joy to many. In this new poetry anthology, Leaning toward Light, acclaimed poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor brings together a diverse range of contemporary voices to offer poems that celebrate that joyful connection to the natural world. Several of the most well-known contemporary writers, as well as some of poetry’s exciting rising stars, contribute to this collection including Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews. With a foreword by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of the New York Times bestseller World of Wonders—it includes reflective pauses and sometimes whimsical recipes by the poets themselves.
“This collection brings together many of my favorite writers to celebrate the limitless offerings of nature; wandering through its pages feels like taking a long stroll through a beautiful garden.”
— Alice Waters, chef, author, food activist, and founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard Project
“Among the many things to love about this beautiful anthology is that it reminds us that gardening is a gathering practice, a practice of gathering, and the more we do it together—with collaborators human, critterly, fungal, floral, meteorological, cosmic, unborn, living, living now as soil, etc.—the better, by which I mean the more lovingly, the more belovingly, the more truly, we do it.”
— Ross Gay, author of Inciting Joy and The Book of Delights
“It’s thrilling to see in these pages a reflection of the world I want to live in.”
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of the New York Times bestseller World of Wonders, from the foreword
Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor is local to the Bay Area where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.