Margaret Yapp
Green for Luck is a book that wanders green city blocks, denying happenstance and making lists. Yapp attends to mundanity as a string that holds us close to the earth, building quotidian divinities, landing jokes just to make sure we’re listening. In this book, words push the left and upper margins, forcing the body of the page to act as negative space, a place where the light gets in.
Green for Luck speaks through Scrabble, through text messages, through gossip and snippets of conversation and well-worn idioms that crack open in Yapp’s steady hands. The cacophony of voices is a blurred, gentle cyclone. Green for Luck listens as much as it speaks; Green for Luck listens so it can speak. And behind each word, its corresponding object is transfigured by being named. Behind each line, a glacial erratic resting on unfamiliar stone. Behind each poem, boundless grasslands where the speaker recognizes itself as a gap in the world, similarly vast but horizontal against the cyclical.
Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City, Iowa. She is the Managing Editor at Prompt Press and runs Rampage Party Press. Margaret has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. She has taught classes in literature, creative writing, and book arts for the University of Iowa and Iowa City Poetry. Green for Luck is her first book.
