POETRY
My debut book of poems, Green for Luck, was released in April 2024 by EastOver Press.
You can purchase Green for Luck at most bookstores.
If you don’t have your own favorite independent bookstore, I’d love if you purchased it from my hometown bookstore Prairie Lights.
Green for Luck “press”:
Some poems in Green for Luck were published online - many thanks to those editors and readers. You can read them here:
“Margaret Yapp’s Green for Luck is a precocious, bold first book. It is a fun, honest read that’s not afraid to be, literally, “all over the place”, all over the page. It encourages us to explore our dramatic, grounded, “messy” versions of home, steadfastness and curiosity. In these pages you will find inquiries into the self and what the self is made of, with unblinking truth and joy.”
-TRACIE MORRIS, author, human/nature poems
“Green for Luck begins with a list of fields. “...the field familiar, the field by a lake, the field with no gate...” The open field, the unified field, the field of American poetry: in this warped and lucid debut, Margaret Yapp prances across all the fields, making her strange, shimmering music. These poems bend the page, break idioms, demand that you stup and study their erratic orbits. I kept asking myself: where my eyes should be, how do I read these poems? Delirious, the delight of being so disoriented: I emerged from Green for Luck with my sense of reading - of poetry itself - reseeded, remade, renewed.”
-TOBY ALTMAN, author, Discipline Park
“The effervescence and allure of Margaret Yapp’s debut collection Green for Luck is her keen intuition to be both playfully sharp and delicately discerning. Green for Luck contains a beautiful balance of chorus and refrain from a poet whose confidence and ease propels the collection’s neoteric coolness and observent nerve. What is to be said to a poet who writes of being shy, of being insecure, of being self aware, of being loved, of seeking or finding god - in lovers or friends or her dog - Yapp’s writing is not so mischievious as it is appreciative. Her ability to be her own lover is the collection’s true centerfold. Since first reading Margaret Yapp’s poetry several years ago, I find myself returning to lines that have surfaced and resurfaced as this collection has reached its final form: “as this body bloom / this body’s knot”. Whether from the reverbs of “DUMP TINKER” or “PUTTER PINE”, or the playwrighting feature of “C”, each piece in this collection has the power of pulse to both charm and strike, reminding the reader that Yapp is in control.”
-m.s. REDCHERRIES, author, Mother
“Threaded across each deceptively playful litany in Green for Luck is a treatise about what it could mean to both be and feel good now: “The world’s literally on fire & we were born into the middle. The middle of / the light. I’m distracted & busy waiting for a text back.” We’re falling asleep on the couch at the end of a party, the conversation slipping deliciously into the next room. A descendent of everything the sound poets meant by “field,” Green for Luck reinvigorates the page as a limit through modes of witness that know the screen but turn toward the page. A simmering debut. A book equal parts landscape and singing bowl.”
-SARAH MINOR, author, Slim Confessions
“Margaret Yapp is a poet who will not allow me to forget her. When she writes, “I get off on finding meaning,” she means it. When she refers to her poems as “inside jokes with myself rotated by familiar angles,” I believe her. And I laugh anyway. She’s so funny and obsessive and aware. I have to imagine she encounters the world much as a raccoon does - curiously, hungrily, and with her hands, holding it close, turning it over in her weird little fingers until its bumps and peculiarities tell her the story she’s feeling it for. Somehow, her poems manage to be both unberably precise and unimaginably wild. Each time I read them, I find myself chasing a voice too slippery and alive to ever actually be caught, a voice given to playfulness and mischief, but also to tenderness, to examination, to deep attention and all the ways sound and light and feeling determine the shape of a life. In other words, Green for Luck is a good book. I think only Margaret could have written it.”
-STEVEN DUONG, author, At the End of the World There is a Pond