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Hardcover Details
  • 05/2018
  • 978-1-944037-76-5
  • 525 pages
  • $35.00
Love Songs: The Lives, Loves, and Poetry of Nine American Women
John Dizikes, author

Adult; Lit Crit, Lit Bio, Essay, Film; (Market)

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.)

Reviews
This fine book from Dizikes (Opera in America: A Cultural History), professor emeritus of American Studies at UC–Santa Cruz, follows the lives and work of nine American women poets who rose to prominence in the first half of the 20th century. Some, such as Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Dorothy Parker, are still familiar names. Others, such as Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, and Elinor Wylie, have fallen into obscurity. All, however, gravitated at some point to New York City and contributed to its vibrant literary and cultural scene. Dizikes explores their lives by dividing his book into sections based on historical period, offering a slice of each woman’s life in each section, allowing readers the chance to compare and contrast, or to flip through the book and read any one poet’s life through. Dizikes’s prose is straightforward and easily readable, without critical jargon. His chief strength, however, is his ability to convey the personal cost of art for women in this period: some left husbands and children behind or had abortions, Parker attempted suicide twice, and a few faced a lack of recognition for their work as they aged. This would make an excellent gift book for bibliophiles, easy to dip in and out of, and filled with attention-grabbing and important poems and stories. (BookLife)
Advance Praise

"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

 

Formats
Hardcover Details
  • 05/2018
  • 978-1-944037-76-5
  • 525 pages
  • $35.00
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