The Seasons Reside in the Trees by Taylor Tessa Lutz

Speaking of forms found in poetry and nature, Robert Hass observed, “…we make our forms because there is no absolute continuity, because those first assurances are broken. The mind, in the act of recovery, creates.” Taylor Lutz’s The Seasons Reside in the Trees is poetry in the act of recovery, or, as Lutz puts it, “I read somewhere this is normal, / though lately I have been questioning everything.” Like a blossoming tree grafted with a dozen kinds of fruits, Lutz’s collection emerges from hard-earned patience and dazzling renewal.

–James Shea

Toughness and vulnerability so rarely occupy the same space, but it is the marriage of those two states that is the makings of resiliency, the ability to stand. In Taylor Tessa Lutz’s collection The Seasons Reside in the Trees, a sequence that reveals a romantic relationship fallen, we are given smart, tough lyrics, each one like tree rings that are exposed only after the tree is cut, each round testifying to a season passed, a season survived, strength pulled from those wounds, as if from each poem new shoots were rising, branching out, reaching for the sun.

–Bradford Tice, author of What the Night Numbered

Taken together, these poems form a sequence in which relationships are up in the air, questions are unanswered, but the surprising details of life, pinecones and Rubik’s Cubes, flare up as exit windows and entrance doors away from and into the daily fabric of lives, relationships, and authentic self-conceptions. “Lately, I have been questioning everything,” Taylor Tessa says midway through her rambunctious, moving, warm and inventive first collection.

–David Blair