Willow from the Willow

Margaret Young grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. After graduating from Yale, she worked in a traveling theater company before earning an M.A. in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. She has taught and done residencies in many settings, and earned an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005. Her first poetry collection, Willow from the Willow, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2002. Her most recent collection, Almond Town, appeared with Bright Hill Press in 2011. She teaches at Endicott College and was recently appointed to the faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies. “By turns lyric, sardonic, and elegiac, Margaret Young is always a meticulous observer, learning, Willow from the Willow, as she watches May ‘etch and bloom,’ records the misdoings of a cough that’s a ‘small beast in my chest,’ and mourns a mother whose ghostly presence blesses these pages when she returns in dreams, ‘wet hands shining for me.’ It’s a pleasure to read the words this poet murmurs as she moves sure-footedly toward ‘the sweet white ice of tomorrow’” –Sandra M. Gilbert “At the center of this wide-ranging and highly engaging and accomplished first collection of poems by Margaret Young is a paradoxical sensibility: one with a girl’s heart and a woman’s breadth of experience. Ms. Young is at ease in the realm of myth as well as in the realm of the pathologies of family life. She embraces loss and death with the same dignity and unselfconsciousness as she embraces joy and discovery. There is one elegant surprise after another as you read through these poems, and in the end there is the clear sense that you have been in the presence of a true lover of words and a spinner of sometimes frighteningly clear tales of who we are and why we are this way.” –Bruce Weigl “‘What have you got to show for your tears?’ Margaret Young asks herself and everyone. She has a gorgeous new book to show, one filled with places and moments I love, admire, and sometimes envy. ‘Your mother is not there to catch you / again, her face not smiling / from the promised first snow cloud’—I am wounded and healed by these lines and by many, many others. I am grateful that this book exists.” –Franz Wright More Information: Margaret Young Website Connotation Press Daily Dose of Lit Literary Mamahttps://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clpc_bks/1157/thumbnail.jp