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.
Peter Yates — Collected Poems
Peter Yates made a Silver Lake house into an international concert room and poetry into another form of musical listening. His sonnets, garden poems, meditations, and elegies join Hopkins-like verbal intensity to architecture, family ordeal, experimental music, and the stubborn daily labor of attention.
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.
William Andrew Spalding — Collected Poems
William Andrew Spalding helped build the Los Angeles Times while writing poems about oranges, newspapers, civic ambition, belief, and the unruly companions he called his “vagabonds.” Printer, editor, historian, and rationalist, he caught a booming city between booster confidence and the comic disorder of daily life.
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.
Olive Percival — Collected Poems
Insurance clerk, bibliophile, gardener, photographer, collector, cat lover, and fiercely independent poet, Olive Percival built a handmade world of beauty in Los Angeles on a working woman’s salary. Her delicate books and sharp diaries reveal an artist of miniatures whose wit, discipline, and eccentric passions were anything but small.
Frona Lane — Collected Poems
Frona Lane reinvented herself across newspaper verse, radio, teaching, performance, and a remarkable trio of California poetry books. Her work can be playful, erotic, devotional, surreal, or formally jagged, moving from Apples of Gold through Third Eyelid to the startling late experiments of Worm, Feed Gently.
Albert Fenner Kercheval — Dolores; and Other Poems
A Forty-Niner, Los Angeles horticulturist, public official, and indefatigable newspaper poet, Albert Fenner Kercheval wrote California as he helped cultivate it. His work moves from mining-camp comedy and Civil War politics to botanical observation, family grief, civic argument, and the haunting Spanish romance of Dolores.
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.
Harry MacPherson — Squared Circles and Other Poems
Sportswriter, automobile journalist, comic performer, and poet, Harry MacPherson brought the velocity of the modern newspaper into Squared Circles. His verse races through cars, courtship, California roads, family feeling, urban spectacle, and self-mocking rhyme, capturing a Jazz Age writer delighted by both speed and sentiment.