In the first third of the twentieth century, the women's poetry movement emanated from New York City's Greenwich Village. This powerful and moving collective biography by National Book Critics Circle Award-winner John Dizikes tells the interwoven stories of Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Genevieve Taggard, Sara Teasdale, and Elinor Wylie. All were successful and innovative as poets, and lived rich and complex lives professionally and personally. As poets, writers, editors, and public figures, they were important in the emergence of New York City as the literary capital of the nation. (Includes 80 poems and 19 photographs.)
"There are no women represented in Samuel Johnson's eighteenth century Lives of the Poets, but by the early twentieth century we see a reversal of this gender bias, when women participated fully in the revolutionary eruption of Modernism. Women were primary innovators whose achievements are all the more astonishing when we consider the restrictions and resistance they frequently faced. It has been said that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels, and as John Dizikes shows, the nine women poets profiled in Love Songs rose above convention and social contraints to become powerful agents of a new poetic age. Intellectually astute, sexually adventurous, and artistically audacious, these women lived lives of great courage, and left a poetic legacy that deservies our admiration and attention."
-- Gary Young
"A devoted compendium of the lives-in-poetry of a fascinating tangle of women emerging at the same commanding early 20th century moment, bringing a fierce although complicated independence to the fore. In spite of their fame, these writers are worthy of additional readership and interest, and John Dizikes' encomiums offer a new 'front.'"
-- Anne Waldman
"A master historian at his most magisterial: wide-ranging, expansive, generous."
-- Lawrence Weschler
