Yda Hillis Addis — Collected Poems
A teenage Los Angeles poet became a border-crossing journalist, translator, folklorist, and one of the strangest missing-person stories in American letters. These poems recover the astonishing beginning of that life.
Rose Hartwick Thorpe — Collected Poems
“Curfew Must Not Ring To-night” made her famous before she was twenty, but California gave Rose Hartwick Thorpe a second landscape: missions, poppies, sea caves, Pacific sunsets, and the bright strangeness of San Diego.
Mary C. F. Hall-Wood — Sea-Leaves
She edited a Santa Barbara newspaper, taught herself the machinery of print, and turned the Pacific, the mountains, wildflowers, missions, drought, and civic life into one of Southern California’s earliest substantial books of poetry.
Madeleine Ruthven — Mountain Fire and Other Poems
Madeleine Ruthven wrote from both sides of Hollywood: inside the studios as a screenwriter and outside them as a poet of institutions, city pressure, mountain fire, and hard-won solitude. These five verified poems recover the surviving edge of two rare Primavera Press books and her later work in Poetry without pretending that the unavailable books have been collected.
Lucile Nickerson Colyer — Thy Neighbor
Lucile Colyer turned a voyage to Japan, the sudden death of her husband, and the friendship that carried her through grief into a book-length protest against wartime racial hatred. Written in plain blank verse, Thy Neighbor follows Japanese and Japanese American friends through war, removal, incarceration, and resettlement from the perspective of a Los Angeles woman who tried to help them.
James Gowdy Clark — Collected Poems
A Civil War songwriter and “laureate of labor” found his final horizon on Mount Lowe, turning Southern California’s peaks, clouds, islands, and new electric railway into radiant late poems.
Henri Coulette — The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems
Secret agents, old movies, family ghosts, junk shops, martinis, and lethal wit crowd Henri Coulette’s first book. This edition resets the complete prizewinning The War of the Secret Agents and Other Poems in its original order, with its five divisions, epigraphs, dramatic voices, stanza patterns, and relative line indents intact.
Edwin Rolfe — Brickyards at Beacon and Other Poems
A subway digger, Spanish Civil War volunteer, Hollywood exile, and relentless anti-fascist forged poems in the pressure chamber where friendship, conscience, politics, and survival collide.
Bertolt Brecht — Hollywood Elegies
Exiled in Santa Monica while Europe burned, Bertolt Brecht turned pepper trees, oil derricks, swimming pools, movie labor, irrigated gardens, fighter planes, and the commerce of the dream factory into a compact poetry of paradise and hell. This reset bilingual edition distinguishes his six-poem manuscript sequence from Hanns Eisler’s song cycle and gathers the principal English translations and related California poems with full source notes.
Joe Hill — Songs of Labor and the Soup Line
Joe Hill made poetry useful on the dock, in the street, and at a union meeting. During his years around San Pedro, he turned hymns and popular hits into compact weapons against hunger, scabbing, long hours, military discipline, and religious hypocrisy. This edition gathers twenty-four Hill songs and poems, restores the complete poetic contents of the Los Angeles IWW songbook, reproduces the complete 1915 soup-line pamphlet, and adds three songs by fellow movement writers whose work gives Hill’s print world its prison, memorial, and international context.