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by V. R. Lang (Author), Rosa Campbell (Editor)
A revelatory new collection of work by V. R. "Bunny" Lang, an eccentric, thrilling American poet revived from oblivion. The collection includes work from across Lang's inimitable career, including many never-before-published poems.
V. R. "Bunny" Lang was the best friend of Frank O'Hara and a central figure in the lively Harvard literary scene of the early 1950s, out of which such very different writers as John Ashbery, Alison Lurie, Edward Gorey, and Robert Creeley emerged. Lang's work was startling, strange, playful, caustic, alarming, and beautiful, with a theatrical turn that grew out of her involvement with the Poets' Theatre. The Miraculous Season, edited by the scholar and writer Rosa Campbell, offers a new, expanded gathering of Lang's poetry, including previously unpublished work drawn from her archives. Campbell's introduction tells the story of Lang's fascinating life and her early death, making it clear how and why her work belongs in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry.Author Biography
V.R. "Bunny" Lang (1924-1956) was a poet, playwright, actress and director born in Boston, the youngest of six daughters. She was a founding member of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1950, where she staged two verse dramas, Fire Exit (1952) and I Too Have Lived in Arcadia (1954), and starred in multiple other productions, including the original performance of Frank O'Hara's Try! Try! (1951). Her poetry was widely published in her lifetime, particularly in POETRY, and she was, for a time, editor of the Chicago Review. She died of Hodgkin's disease at the age of thirty-two.
Rosa Campbell lives in Edinburgh, and is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St Andrews, where she also teaches modern and contemporary literature. Her poetry has appeared in various places, including Oxford Poetry, fourteen poems, Perverse, Ambit, Gutter, and SPAM. Her first book, Pothos, a memoir-ish lyric essay about grief and houseplants, was published in 2021.
