Margaret Yapp’s Green For Luck (Eastover Press) is a refreshing shock to the senses. Every page asks the reader to unlearn their expectations.
I hear all the time that readers want to be surprised — I even tell my own students that — but it’s been a long time since I experienced it. In Green For Luck, it happens page after page. Even when a form is repeated, the content and construction are fresh and vital. Yapp is an innovator, clearly in love with language and its parts. And her debut poetry collection is a testament to her felicity.
Sometimes sonic, sometimes meandering, sometimes all imagery, this collection pulls from all manner of structures and art forms to create a collage of language, cohesive and intentional, that meditates on this moment.
It was hard to break away from reading Green For Luck, which made it hard to give each poem the space it sometimes needed. These poems are dense and elusive, like storm clouds rolling in and passing; some need close attention while others sear immediately into you. Those searing moments also deserve closer attention. How did Yapp do this so quickly? How did we move from ephemeral to visceral in such a small space?
Yapp plays with form throughout the book. For example, the table of contents comes after the book’s first four poems, and a third of the book is written as a play. Glacial Eratics’ stanzas are placed in the corners of a double-page spread, each independent though certainly connected. On several different pages I wrote “is this a form” or “did she invent a form?”
It is clear that Yapp has spent a lot of time studying poetry. These poems feel pared down and exacting; they are not an exercise in experimentation but the product of careful attention to the auditory which makes them smart on the page. Her language is quick (“Like how flood water busts empty space & emptiness / inevitably return : return : return : returns”) and playful (“Pissed & eager, downstairs dreamer, body by IBS”). It is human.
While many of the poems use casual language and deal with the everyday, there’s a precision to them that makes their accessibility feel feral. Green For Luck is Iowan, too. It is a treatise on the prairie, on survival. It luxuriates in the good middle of this state and the animalness it takes to live.
This book took me to school. It made me remember why I love to read, why I love poetry, why art cannot be reined in by convention or expectation. Green For Luck should serve to many as an introduction to sound poetry, to conveying a vibe, to the grit and vim and vigor that language espouses.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2025 issue.
