L. Sandra Deeth — Desert Dwellers

Desert Dwellers is a sprawling poetic map of Southern California’s arid country, written by an author whose identity has nearly vanished. Under the name L. Sandra Deeth, the book moves from the Colorado River basin through the Mojave Desert and into Death Valley, naming springs, mines, plants, animals, ghost towns, roads, and camps along the way. Its poems can be funny, devotional, documentary, or quietly elegiac, and the accompanying photographs suggest travel grounded in repeated firsthand experience. This edition resets all 143 poems in the 1930 book, including ten poems omitted from the earlier Text/Tech edition, keeps the book’s three-part journey intact, and restores the stanza patterns and purposeful indentations obscured by the scan’s damaged text layer.