Joe Hill — Songs of Labor and the Soup Line
Joe Hill made poetry useful on the dock, in the street, and at a union meeting. During his years around San Pedro, he turned hymns and popular hits into compact weapons against hunger, scabbing, long hours, military discipline, and religious hypocrisy. This edition gathers twenty-four Hill songs and poems, restores the complete poetic contents of the Los Angeles IWW songbook, reproduces the complete 1915 soup-line pamphlet, and adds three songs by fellow movement writers whose work gives Hill’s print world its prison, memorial, and international context.
Griffes, James Hartness — Collected Poems
Linked rubaiyat, antiwar poems, gallows songs, and Free Earth chants by the editor and California land reformer known as Luke North.
Greenberg, Jack — Hear Ye the Court
A 1939 Los Angeles dramatic poem puts courts, churches, press, punishment, and class justice on trial.
J. William Lloyd — Collected Poems
A frontier doctor, anarchist publisher, nature mystic, free-love theorist, and inveterate traveler sings hospital wards, erotic freedom, Pima country, Atlantic storms, English birds, Walt Whitman, and the strange exhilaration of a life deliberately lived outside the ordinary rules.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Collected Poems
Before Herland made her famous, Charlotte Perkins Gilman turned hymns, ballads, comic fables, and biting satire into weapons against domestic confinement and political exclusion. Written partly from the hard-won freedom of her Pasadena years, these poems make social argument sing.
Ruth Le Prade — Collected Poems
A bedridden schoolgirl became Edwin Markham’s celebrated protégé, a fearless antiwar socialist, the editor of a landmark Eugene Debs tribute, and the creator of Los Angeles’s Poets Garden—then turned private grief into a lifetime campaign for prisoners, poetry, and radical hope.
Edith Maida Sturges — Insurrection, and Other Poems
A Texas press poet became a Chicago song-trade professional, a Los Angeles relief organizer, the founder of the radical Mount Helios community, a target of obscenity prosecutions, and—in one ugly contradiction—an author of anti-Japanese propaganda. Her recovered writing makes a startling record of rebellion, commerce, care, prejudice, and conscience.
Isaac Kinley — Labor Rhymes
A teacher, antislavery politician, battlefield commander, newspaper editor, and Los Angeles labor agitator turned his long fight against bondage into verse. Isaac Kinley’s Labor Rhymes confronts plutocracy, war, exploitation, and despair with the stubborn conviction that workers can think, organize, and remake the world.
Morrison I. Swift — Advent of Empire
Morrison I. Swift hurled poetry and polemic into the battles over empire, poverty, marriage, public ownership, and personal freedom. His Los Angeles writing belongs to the city’s radical underground: prophetic, abrasive, anti-imperialist, and impossible to separate neatly into literature and agitation.
Upton Sinclair — Hell
Upton Sinclair sends politicians, profiteers, editors, preachers, and complacent reformers into Hell—then makes them argue their cases in a savage dramatic pageant. Written during his Southern California years, this rarely read play in verse turns the muckraker’s political fury into theater: comic, furious, topical, and still unnervingly recognizable.