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The Forage House

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( 56 ratings, 11 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
The Forage House by Tess Taylor is a poignant poetry collection exploring the complexities of inheritance and history through the author's family legacy. The poems navigate between the legacies of prominent slaveholding families, missionaries, poor Appalachian ancestors, and the controversial figure of Thomas Jefferson. By blending personal history with broader American narratives, Taylor uncovers fragments of the pastβ€”artifacts, stories, and memoriesβ€”that reveal tensions between recorded history and what remains untold. The collection invites reflection on the nature of memory, loss, and the enduring impact of ancestral legacies.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers interested in poetry that intersects with history, genealogy, and American culture. It will particularly appeal to those who appreciate lyrical explorations of personal and collective pasts, and who are drawn to works addressing themes of inheritance, memory, and identity.

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Tess Taylor s much-anticipated lyric debut is at once a sensuous reckoning with an ambiguous family history and a haunting meditation on national legacy. The Forage House explores how we make stories, and how stories even painful ones make us.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Attic boxes full of shards. Family stories full of secrets. A grandchild wondering what to save and what to throw away seeks to make sense of what it means to inherit anything at all.

In The Forage House, the speaker unravels a rich and troubling history. Some of her ancestors were the Randolph Jeffersons, one of Virginia's most prominent slaveholding families. Some were New England missionaries. Some were dirt-poor Appalachians. And one was the brilliant, controversial Thomas Jefferson.

Shuttling between legend and story, history and family tale, these poems visit cluttered attics, torn wills, and marked and unmarked graves. Working alongside historians and archaeologists, Taylor unearths buttons, pipes, and the accidental rubble of a busy state building its new freeway.

Based in years of research and travel, these poems form a kind of lyric journalism, collaged from tantalizing fragments. Moving between past and present, East and West, they reveal an uneasy genealogist struggling with ambiguous legacies. The poems ask how fragments exert force now. They dance between inheritance and loss, reimagining illuminating lies.

In their hunger to assemble and remember, they also forge a new record of struggle and love: how much I wish for will not be recorded.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Praised for its courage and lyrical depth, The Forage House is recognised as a compelling blend of history and poetry. Natasha Trethewey highlights Taylor's skill in uncovering the visible and invisible traces of history, creating a work that is both haunting and resonant. Robert Pinsky commends the intellectual range and emotional candour of the collection, describing Taylor's treatment of Thomas Jefferson as tragic and nuanced, and applauds the book's epic vision that connects personal and public histories. The collection is seen as a brave meditation on the complexities of family and national legacy.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781597092708

Publisher: Red Hen Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 03 October 2013

Country: United States

Imprint: Red Hen Press

Illustration: Illustrations

Audience: General / adult, Professional and scholarly

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 10.0mm

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 228.0mm

Weight: 136g

Pages: 88

About the Author

Tess Taylor has received writing fellowships from Amherst College, the American Antiquarian Society, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She holds graduate degrees in writing from New York University and Boston University. Her chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland and published by the Poetry Society of America, and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. She currently reviews poetry for NPR's All Things Considered and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in El Cerrito, California.

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