Bunichi Kagawa — Collected Poems
A teenage immigrant and Stanford domestic taught himself English poetry, published a hand-printed modernist book, and became a crucial bilingual mentor behind Japanese American literary magazines before and during incarceration. Kagawa’s spare poems turn skyscrapers, violets, hunger, village sunlight, and the night sky into fierce tests of identity.
Francis de Sales Gliebe — My Lady Poverty
A Franciscan classicist turns the life of Saint Francis into a sweeping blank-verse drama—then stages California mission history before thousands on the steps of Santa Barbara’s Old Mission and carries it into the silent-film era. This edition restores both surviving plays from their original scans, complete with speakers, songs, shared lines, and stage action.
F. Fukuzo Tanaka — Songs of Hyakunin-Isshu Anglicized
A Los Angeles metaphysical writer undertook an audacious feat: recasting all one hundred poems of Japan’s Hyakunin Isshu into thirty-one-syllable English, then explaining every poem in his own unmistakable voice. This edition restores that rare 1938 experiment together with Tanaka’s surviving original verse.
Neeta Marquis — Collected Poems
Born in a frontier Orange County settlement, Neeta Marquis became a poet, reporter, teacher, art critic, club organizer, historian, and opera librettist at the center of Los Angeles literary life. Her poems turn fog, poinsettias, redwood forests, city flower stalls, crickets, and California rain into precise instruments for measuring memory, beauty, and change.
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.
Lillian Amber Hunt — Arista and Other Poems
A star-bearing maiden descends to rescue a poet, the wind breaks every chain, and fairy dancers cross an Ebell Club stage: Lillian Amber Hunt’s surviving poems turn spiritual allegory, women’s labor, desire, and performance into an ardent record of Los Angeles literary life just after World War I.
Lovell Bearse Pemberton — Collected Poems
Poet, electrical pioneer, railway inventor, architect, and pilgrim to Palestine, Lovell Bearse Pemberton moved between mythic drama and the machinery of modern Southern California. His verse turns Sappho, Prometheus, skyscraping church spires, atoms, streetcars, and the Grand Canyon into one restless argument about freedom, science, beauty, and fate.
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.
Charles Antone Cavalli — Collected Poems
A La Honda storekeeper and deputy sheriff turned California into a stark late-modernist landscape of redwoods, Pacific storms, war, death, and stubborn natural beauty. Cavalli’s sole book, printed in only three hundred copies after his death, returns here complete and newly restored from the original scan.
Lawrence Lipton — Collected Poems
A Chicago modernist who became Venice West’s loudest impresario, Lawrence Lipton fused aviation, atomic dread, ritual, jazz, sex, and street life into poems built to be spoken aloud. This edition restores his two poetry books, a dramatically different early version of Rainbow at Midnight, and uncollected magazine poems.