The Miraculous Season

Selected Poems

VR 'Bunny' Lang author Rosa Campbell editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd

Published:29th Feb '24

£16.99

Available for immediate dispatch.

The Miraculous Season cover

A Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2024. In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard blazes the incandescent work of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang (1924-56), the American poet and playwright whose name has been all but erased from literary history. The fiery nerve centre of the literary scene around mid-century Harvard, and best friend of the iconic New York School poet Frank O'Hara - who referred to her as 'one of our finest poets' - Lang herself has languished in the shadows of American poetry for too long. This book brings into print some of Lang's most startling, strange, and beautiful poetry, much of which has never been published before, drawing her into the spotlight at last. It includes an editor's introduction by scholar and writer Rosa Campbell, on Lang's fascinating and often hilariously eccentric life, devastatingly early death, and her rightful place in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry. The Miraculous Season, published in Lang's centenary year, is a revelation of the true breadth and brilliance of her poetry, rediscovered and made available in print for the first time since 1975.

'These are young poems by a poet who got to stay young, and shared her youth with poets we know but her youthful playfulness and unswerving fate and unabashed and forceful ear excite me because suddenly I'm on an unknown road in the annals of poetry history. It's a little familiar. It's great. It's like she just walked in. And made the whole story true. We have someone new to talk with and a different history, Bunny Lang just rewrote it.' - Eileen Myles;'These poems, which are not exactly personal, do convey the brilliant personality of V.R. "Bunny" Lang, poet, dramatist, and founding figure of 1950s Boston avant-garde theater... They are bitchy, allusive to events off-stage, to a personality, even, that's off-stage. Always alive, still alive (despite an early, tragic death)... these are tone-of-voice works, totally vocal, startingly rhymed, choppy syntax, spare punctuation, interesting pronouns. Something that remains very modern starts here.' - Alice Notley

  • Commended for A Poetry Book Society Spring Special Commendation 2024

ISBN: 9781800173378

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

232 pages