Blight Summer by Margaret Young

“Margaret Young‘s poetry is the perfect combination of childhood and adulthood.  It is sassy, wise and funny.  I recommend her poetry to anyone who loves a really great read.  It never disappoints, and always ends leaving the reader wanting more.”

–Noelle Kocot

The brief poems of Blight Summer, like wind or a slant of light, affect me as haiku might, or a brush stroke that is especially bold and bracing. I love how Margaret Young can take an ordinary experience or image and refresh it in language both simple and singing. Somehow her poems accommodate sweetness and terror, with their ghosts and babies and all things simultaneously growing, dying, and dead. These are poems that think, too: “I read Celan and don’t slide/down slides, I’m in a skirt, I swing.” They’re funny, and awful: “crows walk down the street/talking to themselves, and only the road kill/rabbit’s ears remain.” At every turn, an acknowledgment of deep pleasure; in every poem, the knowledge of mortality. And aren’t they interchangeable? I love this book: brava!

–Kathy Fagan, author of Sycamore

How delicious to open Margaret Young’s Blight Summer and find a voice so deft and lively, so tuned to the heart and saturated with thought.  Young works her magic like those illuminators who could, in one small iridescent scene, evoke the cosmos. With her sleight of hand, she moves us from mother’s milk to the milky galaxy we live in, from a child’s hard question on the playground to mortality and Orpheus, from a dog “sniffing each rich inch” to “this young century’s hungers.”   In poems playful and pointed, inventive and precise, Young makes a glistening art of every moment she brings her voice to.

–Lynn Powell, author of The Zones of Paradise and Season of the Second Thought