green for luck

GREEN FOR LUCK is a unique collection of original poems by American midwestern poet Margaret Yapp, who lives and writes in Iowa.

Green for Luck is a book that wanders green city blocks, denying happenstance and making lists. Margaret 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.

(Published in 2024 by EastOver Press, Rochester, Massassachusetts.)