William J. Margolis — The Anteroom of Hell and The Eucalyptus Poems

William J. Margolis belonged to the hand-to-hand literary culture that joined postwar Bay Area little magazines to the radical poetry of Venice. Born in Pittsburgh in 1927 and recorded as a Chicago stevedore in 1950, he later edited The Miscellaneous Man in Berkeley and issued three small-press collections: The Anteroom of Hell (1957), The Little Love of Our Yearning (1960), and The Eucalyptus Poems (1974). His poems move between Cold War dread, sexual and spiritual crisis, Beat-era experiment, and an attentive California naturalism. This edition gathers the two poems printed in East-West in 1956, the complete recoverable texts of The Anteroom of Hell and The Eucalyptus Poems, and the surviving photographic poem “The Mendicant.” A complete copy of The Little Love of Our Yearning has not yet been recovered, so that book is documented but not silently reconstructed.