Selected Poems
Poetry Book Society Special Commendation Spring 2024
In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard the incandescent work of V. R. "Bunny" Lang (1924-1956) has survived. The American poet and playwright whose name was all but erased from literary history is now decisively back. The nerve centre of the literary scene around midcentury Harvard, founding member of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, best friend of New York School poet Frank O'Hara (he referred to her as "one of our finest poets"), Lang languished in the shadows too long, seen if at all only as O'Hara's "muse". "The Miraculous Season" brings into print her most startling, strange, and beautiful poetry, much of it never published before. She stands in the spotlight at last. Rosa Campbell's introduction evokes Lang's fascinating, often hilariously eccentric life and early death, and gives her back her rightful place in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry. Published in Lang's centenary year, "The Miraculous Season" reveals the breadth and brilliance of her poetry, rediscovered and made available in print for the first time since 1975.
In the archives of the Houghton Library at Harvard the incandescent work of V. R. "Bunny" Lang (1924-1956) has survived. The American poet and playwright whose name was all but erased from literary history is now decisively back. The nerve centre of the literary scene around midcentury Harvard, founding member of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, best friend of New York School poet Frank O'Hara (he referred to her as "one of our finest poets"), Lang languished in the shadows too long, seen if at all only as O'Hara's "muse". "The Miraculous Season" brings into print her most startling, strange, and beautiful poetry, much of it never published before. She stands in the spotlight at last. Rosa Campbell's introduction evokes Lang's fascinating, often hilariously eccentric life and early death, and gives her back her rightful place in the canon of twentieth-century American poetry. Published in Lang's centenary year, "The Miraculous Season" reveals the breadth and brilliance of her poetry, rediscovered and made available in print for the first time since 1975.
About the author
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, Massachussetts in 1950, where she staged two verse dramas, "Fire Exit" (1952) and "I Too Have Live 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.