Louise Gump — Poems
Louise Gump published Poems at nineteen under the name Jane Aul, filling it with broken rhythms, spinning colors, swaying trees, hypnotic flowers, and the restless sound of the sea. Poet, dancer, radio reader, and arts organizer, she made a small book that moves as much as it speaks.
A. Fredric Franklyn — Best Always, Puerco
Poet, editor, film critic, dancer, and actor, A. Fredric Franklyn made poems whose nervous shapes move between New York memory, Hollywood, Mexico City, jazz, cinema, appetite, and mortality. Best Always, Puerco resets twenty-five verified poems from the project archive and newly recovered periodicals. The six-page title sequence is presented as live text rather than facsimile, and its damaged-gutter repairs are openly recorded.
Wesley La Violette — The Bhagavad Gita: An Immortal Song
Composer, teacher, religious writer, and quiet architect of West Coast jazz, Wesley La Violette brought a musician’s sense of recurring lines to his 1945 Bhagavad Gita. He called the book an interpretation rather than a translation: Sanskrit names largely disappear, Krishna is identified with Christ, and the dialogue becomes nearly two hundred pages of stepped English verse. This edition resets the complete prologue and all eighteen chapters, preserving the first edition’s lineation, stanza openings, internal headings, three levels of indentation, and exact distinction among self, Self, and SELF. A substantial biography reunites La Violette’s Chicago modernism, Los Angeles mysticism, and long influence on Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, John Graas, and Frank Patchen.
Stuart Perkoff — Collected Poems
Stuart Perkoff made Venice West audible: its storefront rooms, beaches, prisons, drugs, arguments, lovers, Jewish memory, American violence, and moments of revelation. This edition resets the complete local texts of Alphabet, Kowboy Pomes, and Only Just Above the Ground, adds the recoverable nonduplicative poems from Love Is the Silence and The New American Poetry, preserves his stanza shapes and insets, and documents the much larger corpus that survives in books, archives, and recordings.
Gene Frumkin — Collected Poems
Gene Frumkin carried the political nerve and surreal humor of Los Angeles’s Coastlines circle into four decades of poems about family, the body, New Mexico, Hawai‘i, history, eros, dream, and psychoanalysis. This edition resets the complete books and independent periodical poems presently available in the project archive, preserves his visual lineation and numbered sequences, and documents the books and late poems that still await recovery.
Grace Atherton Dennen — Recovered Poems
Grace Atherton Dennen was a teacher, novelist, club organizer, editor of The Ebell, and founder of The Lyric West. Her recovered poetry is as varied as that career: dramatic monologue, suffrage comedy, Pacific history, domestic memory, agricultural labor, scientific nightmare, Western narrative, flowers, music, faith, and mortality. This volume replaces the old six-poem file with the fullest text-based collection the current archive supports.
Rosalie S. Jacoby — Kaleidoscope and Later Poems
Rosalie S. Jacoby’s Kaleidoscope moves from Los Angeles streets, libraries, theater, sculpture, dispossession, marriage, and literary work into the close observational world of children’s rooms, games, fears, jokes, and questions. This edition resets the complete two-part 1926 book and adds four spare later poems recovered from Variegation, extending her known poetry through 1950.
Robinson Jeffers — Early Poetry
Before Robinson Jeffers became the poet of Tor House, Point Lobos, and the long granite coast, he published two largely forgotten books and then, in 1924, the collection that changed his career. Early Poetry resets all of Flagons and Apples, Californians, and the first-edition sequence of Tamar and Other Poems, tracing his movement from formal love lyrics through Southern California narratives to the fierce, long-lined poetry of Carmel.
E. A. Brininstool — Collected Poems
A telephone operator talks back, coyotes howl in impossible syllables, cowboys curse the railroad and the movies, and the open range disappears in real time. E. A. Brininstool’s comic, musical West is stranger, sharper, and more self-aware than its dusty reputation suggests.
Eliza Ann Otis — Collected Poems
A Civil War diarist, Alaska traveler, newspaper owner, children’s poet, and tireless singer of California, Eliza Ann Otis turned a life lived beside national upheaval into an immense poetry of sunlight, mountains, missions, patriotism, childhood, grief, and spiritual survival.