Margaret Lancaster — The Kingdom of Silences
A mysterious Los Angeles writer compresses devotion into sparks: hills, clay, tears, desert, birds, silence, and the patient work of remaking the self.
Warnack, James Marshall — Soul Symphonies
A religion editor, actor, yogic seeker, and possible literary hand behind Autobiography of a Yogi writes toward unity across faiths.
Bronson, Carl — Collected Poems
A singer and voice teacher turns musical discipline into two sweeping dramas of awakening and the soul.
Margaret J. Honn — Conscience
A forgotten 1925 Hollywood epic sends a failed movie actor through the afterlife with an angel—then confronts him with Peter the Hermit, the white-haired street prophet whose collie, staff, and warnings made him a living conscience for “Follywood.”
Wesley La Violette — The Bhagavad Gita: An Immortal Song
Composer, teacher, religious writer, and quiet architect of West Coast jazz, Wesley La Violette brought a musician’s sense of recurring lines to his 1945 Bhagavad Gita. He called the book an interpretation rather than a translation: Sanskrit names largely disappear, Krishna is identified with Christ, and the dialogue becomes nearly two hundred pages of stepped English verse. This edition resets the complete prologue and all eighteen chapters, preserving the first edition’s lineation, stanza openings, internal headings, three levels of indentation, and exact distinction among self, Self, and SELF. A substantial biography reunites La Violette’s Chicago modernism, Los Angeles mysticism, and long influence on Jimmy Giuffre, Shorty Rogers, John Graas, and Frank Patchen.
Paramahansa Yogananda — Collected Poems
Paramahansa Yogananda made Los Angeles the center of a global spiritual movement and English lyric poetry one of his instruments. In Songs of the Soul and Whispers from Eternity, devotional address becomes intimate, ecstatic, theatrical, and cross-cultural—a poetic record of yoga’s transformation in twentieth-century America.
Allie I. Lucas — The Raven’s Leaf
Publishing as “Aeona,” Allie I. Lucas turned a 1904 journey west and the shock of the San Francisco earthquake into prophetic, feminist, technologically alert spiritual verse. The Raven’s Leaf joins New Thought, temperance, motherhood, rail travel, civic disaster, and personal revelation in one of early Los Angeles’s strangest poetic books.
Richard Frederic Carlyle — Collected Poems
Newspaperman, philosophical traveler, and small-press poet, Richard Frederic Carlyle compressed an extraordinary burst of writing into three books published in Los Angeles in 1933–34. His rhymed Krishna paraphrases, oracular poems, and attack on greed turn Depression-era unease into a strange, ambitious meeting of comparative religion and American public verse.
Annie Elizabeth Cheney — Dreams of Hellas and Other Poems
Annie Elizabeth Cheney transformed Greek myth, spiritual experiment, and a reform-minded Los Angeles household into the luminous, eccentric poems of Dreams of Hellas. Long overshadowed by her husband’s public career, she emerges here as a poet of occult inquiry, classical memory, bereavement, and women’s intellectual independence.