My April Poems by Hazel Hall

Description

2026 | My April Poems by Hazel Hall

Compiled by Tyler Bieber

When her first book, Curtains, was published by John Lane Company in 1921, Portland poet Hazel Hall fought for the inclusion of a series of poems the editor had originally deemed not fit for print. The sequence, a quartet of poems about April and springtime, were some of her favorites from the collection. In the end, the poet won the battle against her publisher. Here, these poems have been reprinted with five more poems about spring from her other books, Walkers (1923) and Cry of Time (1928). The collection opens with a letter from Hazel to her literary mentor, Poetry Magazine’s Harriet Monroe, arguing in favor of “my April,” drawn from the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago.

This chapbook explores springtime as a motif, and change—not unlike the seasons—across the years of a young poet’s life. The poems included represent a small section of a tragically overlooked body of work worthy of rediscovery and reconsideration.

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TYLER BIEBER is a queer author and historian based in Portland, Oregon. His first book is the biography Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic (2025). He is working on a second book, a biography of the poet Hazel Hall.