"A poet of our common human existence" - Edmund Wilson

Genevieve Taggard is recognized as one of the finest American poets of the 20th century. Her work appears in every major anthology of American poetry. Yet this is the first comprehensive collection of her poetry and prose ever published.

To Test the Joy collects the best of Genevieve Taggard's poetry, fiction, memoirs, and criticism, providing a superb overview of her remarkable life and career. Taggard constantly challenged herself as a woman, as a citizen, and as an artist. Hers is a poetry of exceptional power and precision: "a product of fine discipline, a complete and unusual blending," as one reviewer put it.

Genevieve Taggard's life and work embraced issues and experiences at the core of 20th Century history: the oppression of colonialism; the fight for the rights of women; the struggle of labour against capitalism; the destruction of nature by industrialization. Dealing with art, woman's experience, and social injustice, and the natural world, her poetry has much in common with that of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück.

To Test the Joy weaves Taggard's poetry and prose with critical commentary by Anne Hammond that leads the reader through Taggard's life, from her childhood days in Hawaiʻi to the Bohemian world of 1920s New York City to the strikes and protests of the 1930s and her return to the green world at her Vermont farm in the 1940s.