Seren is born on the brink of Wildwood, realm of shadowy fey who listen and laugh–who sometimes bless and sometimes curse. As she grows into young womanhood, shaped by a familial tragedy tied to her conception, she is lured from home by a whispering mystery in Wildwood, where the supernatural roams freely through time and space. In riddling, often dangerous forests and mountains marked by fallen powers and holy women, oracles, hermits, and giants, Seren finds both violence and balm on a path arrowing toward transformation. “Seren, Seren, Seren.” This poem whispers to our fractured souls, and with it Marly Youmans invites us into an adventure that is at once psychologically potent and fantastical. Youmans can paint luminous vistas with her prismatic words. Such holy incantation, now rare in American arts, gives grace to our mystery-filled “Wildwood” journeys. Youmans is a gem, and Seren is an immense gift for the sanctification of our imaginations.” —MAKOTO FUJIMURA, artist, author of Art+Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press) “A little girl dancing between the graves of her brothers, a body held suspended and starlit in a thorn tree.... Marly Youmans is a spinner of archetypal images that seem at once strange and strangely familiar. The poem's form, hybridizing the 'bob and wheel' of medieval poetry with the iambic pentameter narratives of the Romantic and Victorian era, conjures a time-frame outside time, perfectly suited to the story. This book is itself a 'Wildwood' where fey, elusive, illusory phenomena draw the protagonist—and the reader—deeper and deeper into mystery.” —AMIT MAJMUDAR, author of What He Did in Solitary “Into the darkness, mystery, and fate”: that’s where Seren of the Wildwood will take you; also into the light. The old verities are not an embarrassment to Marly Youmans, our “mistress of the marvelous.” For all that has changed in the world over the ages—and all that continues to change, even as we speak, as competing savants tell us this or that is what we must expect—we still gather around “A hearth and wildwood blaze / On nights in winter crowned / By the strange, striking lays / That hold mortals spellbound.” —JOHN WILSON, contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books Seren of the Wildwood is a magical book, a visionary journey through motherhood and the rebellious, unwieldy life-force of the universe. It includes equally magical cover art and interior illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who frequently illustrates Youmans's books. -- The Hollins Critic , Vol. LX, no. 2, April 2023. Youmans' gift for creating primordial archetypal images that stir the gut and fascinate the eye of the mind places her among the best of the poets. If you're a connoisseur, even a lapsed or dilatory one, of narrative poetry, buy Seren of the Wildwood and read it today... My first encounter with Seren of the Wildwood brought to mind dozens of my favourite poems, poems that over the millennia people have taken the trouble to read, copy, annotate, memorise, and perform. Seren of the Wildwood reminded me of them by way of family resemblance; the poem is at home among the poems that last. It is a good poem. A very good poem. --Seth Wright, Front Porch Republic, 10 April 2023 Marly Youmans is a master enchanter whose visionary novels and poetry deserve, even demand, rereading and reading aloud. A poet and novelist, Youmans often teams up with artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins to create beautiful stories that long inhabit the mind afterward... --Tessa Carman, The Living Church (ECUSA) 19 February 2023 Youmans's command of the poetic form is masterful, and a superb choice for fantasy, invoking as it does one of the great medieval fantasists in English. --Jonathan Geltner, Slant Books, 6 March 2023 ...The reader is struck by two things almost immediately. First, the sheer imagination of this work is marvelous. It's an engaging, enthralling story, part epic, part fairy tale, part Iliad and part Odyssey....Seren of the Wildwood is one of the most imaginative works I've read, and especially in poetry. It's the kind of work that you know is changing you as you read it, and you emerge from it as not quite the same person you were before. It's not unlike what happens to Seren on her journey through the wildwood. --Glynn Young, tweetspeakpoetry.com, 28 March 2023 Marly is poet and novelist, and  Seren of the Wildwood  is her sixteenth book. "Youmans (pronounced like "yeoman" with an "s" added) is the best-kept secret among contemporary American writers. She writes like an angel--an angel who has learned what it is to be human" --John Wilson, editor,  Englewood Review of Books.  "Marly Youmans is brilliant, perhaps a genius... Her formal poems are impeccable and include sestinas, villanelles, rondels, rhyming schemes she may have invented, and perfect metrical patterns. Every poet can learn from this poet, and the reader—the re