Edith Maida Sturges — Insurrection, and Other Poems

Edith Maida Sturges—born Edith Maida Lessing and later known as Edith Maida Cook—moved through several literary and political worlds that have rarely been understood as one career. Her 1905 collection Insurrection, and Other Poems joined romantic, devotional, maternal, comic, topical, and socially skeptical verse; in Chicago she wrote popular songs about the Titanic, the circus, and vaudeville spectacle; in Los Angeles she organized food relief and the radical Mount Helios community, opposed civil marriage and private property, and twice faced federal prosecution for mailing writings judged obscene. Her reform commitments coexisted with the virulent racism of her 1916 anti-Japanese song Lookout! California Beware!. This edition resets all thirty-three poems in the 1905 book—including “Lost,” omitted from an earlier contents list—and the three later song lyrics preserved in complete scores. It follows the original book’s divisions and lineation while removing narrow-page hanging wraps and correcting unmistakable typographical damage.