Ridge, Lola. The Ghetto and Other Poems

New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1918. First edition. 8vo. (x), 101 pp. Publisher's brown paper-covered boards, lettered in gilt, extremities lightly rubbed, spine ends and corners worn, lower spine starting; in blue leather fall-down-back box.

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 New York's 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).

Together with:

Ridge, Lola
Autograph Letter, signed
New York, ca. October 25, 1926. Two-page autograph letter, signed by Ridge, to a Miss Ridge of Saginaw, Michigan, regarding a possible familial connection between the two. Creasing from when folded.

This lot is located in Philadelphia.

Provenance

From the collection of Justin G. Schiller

Ridge, Lola. The Ghetto and Other Poems

Ridge, Lola. The Ghetto and Other Poems