These are young poems by a poet who got to stay young, and shared her youth with poets we know but her youthful playfulness and unswerving fate and unabashed and forceful ear excite me because suddenly I'm on an unknown road in the annals of poetry history. It's a little familiar. It's great. It's like she just walked in. And made the whole story true. We have someone new to talk with and a different history,Bunny Lang just rewrote it.
—Eileen Myles
These poems, which are not exactly personal, do convey the brilliant personality of V.R. 'Bunny' Lang, poet, dramatist, and founding figure of 1950s Boston avant-garde theater. They are dramatic speeches, exclamations, soliloquies, addresses for personae, in a described 'setting' and hinting at a story. That is, they are theatrical! They are bitchy, allusive to events off-stage, to a personality, even, that's off-stage. Always alive, still alive (despite an early, tragic death), Lang is perhaps the first woman poet in history to despair of her actual monetary debts. These aret one-of-voice works, totally vocal, startingly rhymed, choppy syntax, spare punctuation, interesting pronouns—Auden's complicit 'we,' the resented 'you,' the masklike 'I.' Something that remains very modern starts here.
—Alice Notley
She is calling us long distance in these poems, telling us how it is with her, how bright things can be, how terrible things are. She was a wonderful person. She is one of our finest poets. We are so lucky to have something of her still!
—Frank O'Hara
Hyperactive and unruly, Lang's poetry sparks with undeniable energy, shifting rapidly through different voices and arrangements . . . reading her is never dull. Nearly every poem produces flashes of intensity and sideways humour.
Rowland Bagnall, TLS
Poems of darkness and forbode echo through this collection . . . Bunny Lang brings her own veritas, her own incantations and ringing churchbells.
—Roy McFarlane, The Poetry Society Bulletin
These poems crackle with youthful, almost absurd energy, formal skill and snappy wit . . . The choppiness of the syntax and sharp asides is propulsive.
—Rachel Mann, The Tablet
This selection is a precious gift to poetry, a real discovery, and consolidation of the reputation of a vital, odd and lively poet, alert to the balancing act of her poems on such fine edge, at the threshold between public and private zones of feeling and display. The poems shine and bristle with routines, tones, intonations, from the breezy and brittle to the entranced and desolate, with something of the power of Stevie Smith's fiction, or Elizabeth Bowen, quite astonishingly various in their quick bond-making, genre-shifting, their dark play at a range of dangerous intimacies: quite a find, quite a long-distance call.
—Adam Piette, Blackbox Manifold
Campbell has diligently sifted through the sprawling Lang archive in the Houghton Library at Harvard and discovered many previously unseen gems. Lang's kooky creation of states of unease is typified by the opening poem . . . Lang is not a bleak or dispiriting poet, and jaunty humour irradiates many of the vignettes collected here.
—Mark Ford, The London Review of Books
Campbell's care for Lang's work and legacy, her critical generosity and attention to textual efficacy grounded in sustained archival research, elevates The Miraculous Season to an ideal example of how to assemble such a project. It's rare to find a book of selected poems for a poet for whom so little work is in circulation, and for that book to be composed mostly of uncollected and unpublished poems, which makes such a project a considerable challenge. What is the version, or versions, of Lang that will come through? Campbell gives us a poet in all her prismatic performativity and despair, all her tonal leaps and lyrical peculiarities, both youthful and dying, whose work is full of suffering and anger and being utterly satisfied with, as she writes, 'that marvelous sensation / Of falling into place with all one's wits working.'
—Nick Sturm, The PoetryProject
Lang's poetry occupies its own domain.
—John Yau, Hyperallergic
