Come Bite

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 fifth full-length 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.