Bert Meyers — Early Rain and Other Poems
A picture framer with a poet’s blade, Bert Meyers cut Los Angeles work, family, illness, desire, and light into poems whose pressure can still startle the breath.
Stanley Allen Kiesel — The Pearl Is a Hardened Sinner
A kindergarten teacher with a satirist’s scalpel, Stanley Kiesel turned children’s jokes, fears, cruelties, and imaginative freedom into fierce poems aimed at parents, schools, bureaucracies, and every adult system that mistakes obedience for life.
William Pillin — Collected Poems
Ukrainian-born poet, WPA dissident, potter, salon host, and collaborator with Polia Pillin, William Pillin fused political history, Jewish memory, music, and the tactile intelligence of handmade objects.
Jack Hirschman — A Correspondence of Americans
Before he became San Francisco’s great street poet, Jack Hirschman made Los Angeles the testing ground for a poetry of formal invention, antiwar resistance, radical translation, visual art, and public life. This edition restores his complete 1960 debut and follows the transformation through recovered Coastlines poems, periodical work, later political lyrics, and bilingual translations.
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.
Guy Emmett Daniels Jr. — Poems and Translations
A satirist of federal poets and civil servants became one of America’s most prolific translators of Russian dissent—carrying Lermontov, Mayakovsky, Krylov, Sakharov, and the unruly Los Angeles poetry underground across languages and decades.
Alvaro Cardona-Hine — Collected Poems
A Costa Rican immigrant turned Los Angeles haiku into weather, childhood, politics, cattle, lemons, and light—then carried the same restless imagination into painting, music, translation, Zen teaching, and more than twenty books.
Josephine Ain — Aspects and Other Poems
The fullest recoverable collection of Josephine Ain’s poetry: the five-part “Aspects,” her three major Coastlines poems, “Seven Haiku,” the late “When From the Night,” and “Patience,” published under her birth name in 1935. The edition joins the poems to an exhaustive biography, publication history, archival images, source notes, and a record of Ain’s work as an artist, actor, salon host, spiritual seeker, and participant in early Los Angeles psychedelic culture.
Curtis Zahn — Poems
Curtis Zahn wrote across poetry, fiction, drama, journalism, painting, collage, radio, and the practical work of building places where artists could meet. His poems share the satirical pressure of his stories: bureaucratic language, advertising, suburban engineering, border tourism, and Cold War confidence are made to stutter until their violence shows. The line can be bluntly documentary or wildly synthetic, with corporate and scientific jargon pushed into grotesque comedy.
Mel Weisburd — Collected Poems
He patrolled Los Angeles as one of its first smog cops, edited a defiant little magazine at night, and turned science, marriage, memory, and grief into searching poems. Mel Weisburd’s extraordinary double life joins the invention of modern air-pollution enforcement to the buried literary history of postwar Los Angeles.