Sydney King Russell — Collected Poems, 1923–1949
Sydney King Russell moved easily between kinds of writing that literary history often keeps apart: formal lyrics, satirical portraits, devotional poems, popular songs, film publicity, anthology making, and the privately printed books of his later decades. The seven substantial witnesses preserved here—beginning with The Changing Flame and ending with Selected Poems, 1919–1948—show a writer repeatedly reordering his own career. The 1949 selection is therefore printed as a separate historical construction rather than used to erase the earlier books.
Odell Francis — Smoking Flax and Other Poems
Odell Francis carried poetry through song, radio, women’s clubs, newspaper columns, editorial work, and an Inglewood manuscript service. This edition restores all forty-three poems in her 1941 collection Smoking Flax and eleven uncollected newspaper poems, including antiwar writing on aircraft, military regimentation, and Shanghai. The documentary biography gathers every securely located event from 1930 to 1942 while keeping her probable legal name and still-unidentified origins, marriage, and later life clearly marked as unresolved.
Rosalie W. Kercheval — Poems
The complete forty-poem sequence that Rosalie W. Kercheval published beside her father in 1883, restored from the original book with contemporary reception, archival documents, and the first evidence-based account of her life.
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.
Alfonso P. Santos — A Garland of Sampaguitas
Alfonso P. Santos wrote A Garland of Sampaguitas while studying in Los Angeles, but the book’s imaginative center is San Antonio, Zambales. Its flowers, winds, birds, moonlight, and remembered streets become a vocabulary for distance: the poems speak from California toward a Philippine home that is sensuously present and physically unreachable. Don Blanding’s introduction recognized the manuscript’s open feeling, while Santos himself described sampaguita fragrance as poetry’s mixture of youth, sorrow, love, and suggestion.
Bernice Ames — Where the Light Bends and Later Poems
The complete texts of Bernice Ames’s three poetry books—Where the Light Bends (1955), In Syllables of Stars (1958), and Antelope Bread (1966)—joined by later periodical poems, archival images, a corrected publication record, and the fullest documented biography yet assembled of the Pennsylvania-born Los Angeles poet, fiction writer, workshop leader, and Poetry Society of America prizewinner.
Eloise Bibb Thompson — Poems and Later Recoveries
The complete twenty-six-poem text of Eloise Bibb’s precocious 1895 debut, joined by two later poems, the original dedication and preface, archival images, a corrected works list, and a full biography of the New Orleans poet who became a teacher, Howard settlement worker, Los Angeles journalist, Catholic activist, pioneering Black screenwriter, nationally produced playwright, and Harlem-era fiction writer.
Ethelean Tyson Gaw — Drums of El Dorado and Other Poems
All fifty-nine poems in Ethelean Tyson Gaw’s 1951 collection, newly reset from the complete source scan, together with all six of her poems in the 1923 Second Anthology of Verse, including the uncollected “Le Jour D’Amour.” Periodical witnesses, archival images, a corrected publication census, and the fullest documented account yet assembled recover her work as poet, playwright, editor, lecturer, and Los Angeles literary organizer.
Hildegarde Flanner — Young Girl and Later Poems
A newly reset reading edition of Hildegarde Flanner’s major poetry books and surviving late groups: the complete Young Girl and Other Poems (1920), This Morning (1921), Time’s Profile (1929), the 1942 New Directions pamphlet If There Is Time, the privately printed In Native Light (1970), four poems from Anthology 81 (1981), and the poetry section of At the Gentle Mercy of Plants (1986), accompanied by archival images, an extensive biography, bibliographies, and a guide to her dispersed papers.
Donald L. Emblen — There Are Sea Gulls on Our Lawn and Later Poems
The complete forty-six-poem text of Donald L. Emblen’s 1947 first book, There Are Sea Gulls on Our Lawn, reset from the original scan and joined by six independently recovered later poems, photographs, family testimony, a reconstructed bibliography, and a full account of his life as poet, teacher, sailor, journalist, translator, hand-press publisher, and Sonoma County’s first poet laureate.