While setting type for letterpress printing, the printer arranges each letter, word, and line upside down and backwards, as well as each space between letters, words, lines, and the margins that surround the text, represented by wood and metal blocks that push and flex against each other. Then, in a dramatic moment that risks the tumbling of dozens of hours of labor to the floor, the printer “locks up” the type and lifts it into the machine, sealing the precise assemblage of meaning and absence into a transferable object. All printed writing carries this meticulous history, but in the age of digital reproduction, not all poets are poets of the page.
Margaret Yapp, an accomplished letterpress printer and bookmaker, lifelong Iowan, and the author of the debut collection Green for Luck (Eastover Press, 2024), is a poet of the page, a “sticky time bomb.” As a physical object, Green for Luck challenges what the reader knows about small press editions. Four poems precede the table of contents; there is a play in the middle called “A Play in the Middle”; handsome angular poems require the reader to turn the book upside down every few pages. A broadside letterpressed to commemorate the launch of the book layers “the list of fields” over a hand-drawn map by Sidney Eberly.
But as immersed in historical traditions of printing and bookmaking as Yapp may be, her speaker is indubitably of our moment. She checks the horoscope app, demands video evidence, “[stays] inside for MODERN RESEARCH.” Yapp’s concerns in Green for Luck are of our immolated era: “The world’s literally on fire & we were born / into the middle. The middle of the light.” But Yapp’s is not a poetry of event or disaster; it is larger, more lasting, attuned to what grows slowly. In a poem titled “My Love Language is Mid,” she writes, “Isn’t this beautiful? Infinity— / redbud browngrass prairiefire : I want you / to know it’s nice to feel warm, crocus.” One gets the impression of a person who has an iPhone but for whom the phone is not the world, as outside lies a vaster natural universe, home to flowers, fires, and bruises left by lovers, which is always posing questions of “earnest belonging.”
Earnest belonging has a long history in American poetry, specifically that of the great Midwestern ecopoets, recalling classics like Lorine Niedecker’s “Easter Greeting”:
I suppose there is nothing
so good as human
immediacy
I do not speak loosely
of handshake
which is
of the mind
or lilies—stand closer—
smell
“[O]f course, I still / wonder about you & the greens / off their feet (chives) / chide, choke up on it,” writes Yapp. “Everyone’s giving me a little too much space... / Oh! I made it myself!” Space in Yapp’s poems is in the style of the prairie states, an endless series of thinly vegetated fields, which the poet walks through “with my righteous catalog of grievances / right here in my pocket.” The poems in Green for Luck reflect a landscape that is owned and populated; was stolen, structured, and divided; which “is not absence since one at a time I meet / circumference.” This awareness, tipping neither into solipsism nor into fallacies of human exceptionalism, is only possible because of Yapp’s careful typesetter’s hand, which weighs lines of everyday conversation against timeless natural images, each letter equally against each space.
In the contemporary moment, it is difficult to write an earnest book. No one, least of all Yapp, is immune to pervasive cynicism and irony, apathy or obsessive “foundational NPR memory.” “It becomes clear ... life is not romantic & animals don’t need us”; she writes “my good behavior as a weapon.” Admiration of landscape or even the proliferation of beauty ring false in a world we know is burning. Yapp can only “hope hope is reasonable,” a “twice removed hope / a hat yet to be invented / an herby soup I’ve yet to try.” In her poetry of attention and possibility, there is at once solace, camaraderie, rigor, and excitement, ideas we must continue to nurture if we are to survive.
Serena Solin lives in Maspeth, NY. She is the managing editor of online literary magazine Nat. Brut and a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse collective. She has a chapbook out with Bottlecap Press called Solar Inverter and another with beautiful days press called The Stay Behind. She is currently a PhD student in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center.