Yda Hillis Addis — Collected Poems

Yda Hillis Addis was still a Los Angeles schoolgirl when her poems began appearing in the city’s newspapers in 1874. They are ambitious, melancholy, formally alert pieces full of bells, ghosts, transformations, paintings, storms, and women testing the limits placed around them. Addis would go on to travel in Mexico, translate and reshape oral narratives, write Gothic fiction and California history, survive a disastrous public marriage, and apparently begin a second life under another name. This edition gathers the verse that can presently be recovered from original newspaper and magazine pages, including the long “Alvarado of Madrid,” and restores the opening chapter of one of Southern California’s most remarkable writing lives.