Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master

Adelaide Crapsey was a visionary poet whose innovative approaches to form laid the groundwork for modernist poetics. Her 5-line cinquains bristle, breathlessly compressed, wriggling and alive. Though her spare, evocative, poems paved the way for the imagists, her work is also undeniably fresh and strange and contemporary, as when she addresses her failing lung, calling it a freak I cannot pardon. In this Unsung Masters anthology, Crapsey--a vital, game-changing poet--finally takes her place in literary history.--Hadara Bar-Nadav

It is high time contemporary literary scholars attended to the poetic voice of Adelaide Crapsey, a neglected New York literary treasure, whose verse at once illuminates and complicates the spirit of the fin de si cle and modernist literary movements in America. Molberg and Bancroft have compiled a collection of Crapsey's work poised to advance our understanding of the female experience of pain, loss, and courage in America. What an appropriate moment to reintroduce Crapsey, given our overdue contemporary evolution, wherein the world is--we hope--finally learning what it means to listen to, hear, and even value the unique female experience.--Ashley E. Reis