The poems of a prose writer-think of William Faulkner or Angela Carter-are usually a side stream, but for Young, poetry was the fountainhead of her creativity. The Collected Poems gathers every Young poem that survives-published, unpublished, drafts-for a definitive edition that rivals the work of a university press. As coeditor Phil Bevis explains in his preface to the newly published The Collected Poems (Sublunary Editions and Chatwin Books, 2022), he sought to reprint Young’s poems 35 years ago with his Arundel Press, but the hunt for some missing verse delayed the project until now. Though her prose works have been in and out of print over the years, her poetry collections were never reprinted after their first appearances. She’s hardly known at all for her two books of poetry, Prismatic Ground (1937) and Moderate Fable (1944). Marguerite Young is known primarily for a mammoth novel, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a hallucinatory picaresque featuring an ensemble of eccentric characters, and for two novelistic historical studies: Angel in the Forest (1945), about the Utopian communities of New Harmony, Indiana, and Harp Song for a Radical (1999), a rhapsodic biography of Eugene Debs.
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