A book of poetry wrangling with your complicated Southern genealogy: this, by definition, is a complicated endeavor. The Forage House, Tess Taylor’s debut book of poetry, finds the author doing just that. The Oxford American talks to her about what that was like:

A lot of these poems are a kind of anti-reporting. They’re a record of the places where the record goes silent. The record is scratched—everyone who would remember what you need is dead, and whoever is alive . . . no one is willing to talk about it.