Jake Zeitlin — Collected Poems

Jake Zeitlin made a bookshop into one of Los Angeles’s great cultural institutions, but he first entered print as a poet. For Whispers and Chants (1927), introduced by Carl Sandburg and printed at the Grabhorn Press, carries Texas memory, erotic modernism, night fantasy, psychological portraiture, and compact irony into the year Zeitlin opened his first independent Los Angeles shop. More Whispers and Chants (1952) gathers mostly early-1930s work as a private communication to family and friends, adding California landscapes and poems for Josephine Zeitlin, Sarah Bixby Smith, and Robinson Jeffers. This edition resets both complete books from source scans and preserves the later book’s lightly revised return to the “East Texas Farm Woman.”