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From award-winning poet, playwright, and cultural critic Tess Taylor, a series of contemporary odes about rooting, attention, and tenderness in a broken world.
How do we steady ourselves? How do we focus attention in the face of climate change, erupting violence, daily onslaught? How do we re-route in the face of nearly chronic grief? In Come Bite, Tess Taylor’s deliciously inviting collection, poems turn close attention to everyday objects—the carrot, the runner bean, a grandmother’s denim shirt, even compost—as a way of steadying a life in the face of these furious days.
Beautifully illustrated with original hand-cut prints by celebrated artist Irenka Pareto, Come Bite moves through kitchens and graveyards, tide pools and fire seasons, exploring how attention can serve as base nourishment and what it might mean to work toward persistence and even joy. These are poems of desire, devotion, and radical attention, odes to eggs and pencils, fungi and plum jam, the phloem of a redwood and the silver-gray shimmer of a mammogram.
A tapestry woven persistently in the middle of a world on fire, Come Bite offers readers companionship during difficult days—a generosity of spirit, a small act of tending, a reminder that attention itself is a form of survival.
"'The poetry of earth,' wrote Keats, 'is never dead.' That poetry—deep tangled roots, the soil's generosity, the fervent hope of new green—shines on every page of this urgent book, the chronicle of a devoted gardener working with all her powers to tend what sustains her and those she loves, body and spirit, in a narrowing, heartless time in this country. Out of that devotion, Tess Taylor makes poems that hold ground and keep faith with what yet might be renewed."—Mark Doty, author of What Is the Grass
"In Come Bite, Tess Taylor declares, 'I am making a meal for the journey,' and with delicious details of food and nature, she invites us along to eat with her. From whale song to roothair, oakfall to turnips and eggs, these poems are odes to the living world, and what we craft from it to nourish mind and body. Taylor’s keen eye sees the saving grace of 'pleasure & plenty' in the garden, the kitchen, the earth, and the ocean, even amid the 'horrors to take in today.' She scrubs the silt, chops the root, soaks the beans, and counsels, 'Don’t miss your joy. / Put the daily laundry of your sadness down.' This is a collection to savor, full of poems loaded with rhythm and sound, rich and varied form, and lush imagery––a collection 'to offer you // sea & earth pleasure / to roll in your mouth.'"—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
"The most DELICIOUS book in a long, long time. Come Bite is magnificent! I adore Tess Taylor's vigor, and her verbs."—Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next
“Dark bread, too many figs, scarlet runner beans, a cluster of oysters. Sometimes we need an ode to the muchness of the world. The poems in Come Bite bring us back to the sharp edge between joy and sorrow to celebrate what is. Come feast on this harvest.”—Danusha Lameris, author of Blade by Blade