RIDGE, Lola (1873-1941). The Ghetto and Other Poems. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918.

8vo. (Slight toning.) Original boards, upper cover and spine gilt-lettered (some light wear to extremities, spine panel chipped and detaching); folding case.

FIRST EDITION of the author's rare first book. Ridge, an Irish-born New Zealand-American, was a modernist poet and anarchist known for her influential editing of avant-garde publications such as Others (1919) and Broom, founded by Harold Loeb in 1921. Ridge's poetry about the Lower East Side in The Ghetto features depictions of communities with mutual need in an "ecstatic, high language of the past, especially of the Elizabethans, to the squalid and the sublime realities of the actual, 20th-century American city" (Robert Pinsky, "Street Poet," Slate).

[With:] RIDGE, Lola. Autograph letter signed ("Lola Ridge"), to Miss Ridge of Saginaw, MI. Station D, New York City, ca 25 October 1926. 2 pages, 8vo, on a bifolium, creased, with the original envelope addressed in Ridge's hand. Regarding genealogy and a possible familial connection between Lola and the recipient.

Property from the Collection of Robert S. Brown, Cincinnati, Ohio

RIDGE, Lola (1873-1941). The Ghetto and Other Poems. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918.