Bertolt Brecht — Hollywood Elegies
Exiled in Santa Monica while Europe burned, Bertolt Brecht turned pepper trees, oil derricks, swimming pools, movie labor, irrigated gardens, fighter planes, and the commerce of the dream factory into a compact poetry of paradise and hell. This reset bilingual edition distinguishes his six-poem manuscript sequence from Hanns Eisler’s song cycle and gathers the principal English translations and related California poems with full source notes.
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.
Eve Ganson — Horn, Thorn, Tooth and Claw
Eve Ganson drew the desert as a comic cast of survivors: roadrunner, rattlesnake, toad, owl, burro, bat, and every creature equipped with horn, thorn, tooth, or claw. This hybrid edition restores her complete fifty-three-poem sequence twice—first as a cleaned facsimile of the illustrated pages, then as a fully reset reading text.
William M. Cheney — Pamphlet on the Four Basic Dialects of Pig Latin
Los Angeles’s legendary typesticker turns Pig Latin into a complete miniature mock-scholarly performance.
William Mackay Caldwell — Pan’s Reeds
A formally restless 1915 Los Angeles book where reeds, sonnets, prayers, and desert light meet.
William J. Margolis — The Anteroom of Hell and The Eucalyptus Poems
A stevedore, printer, and fiercely independent little-magazine editor, William J. Margolis made poems that turn political terror, wounded intimacy, jazz, mysticism, and the stubborn life of California trees into an unruly art of survival.
Thomas J. McGonigle — Dark Donegal and Other Poems
A Donegal-born railroad worker and Los Angeles civic employee turns exile, Irish freedom, California travel, family devotion, political satire, and ordinary friendship into a lifetime’s rough music.
Stanley Preston Kimmel — Collected Poems
A Los Angeles law student became a Verdun ambulance driver, shipwreck survivor, Paris bohemian, coalfield dramatist, and historian—leaving war poems whose anger still cuts cleanly.
Snow Longley Housh — Sonnets of Spinsterhood and Other Poems
A Los Angeles teacher made unmarried female desire the center of a sonnet sequence—and then helped generations of teenagers discover that poetry could be written, not merely admired.
Sarah Bixby Smith — My Sagebrush Garden and Pasear
A California ranch heiress, civic reformer, gardener, memoirist, and poet records a landscape changing under her feet.