Unsung Masters Series

The ninth volume in the Unsung Masters Series, edited by Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft

Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master

The 7th volume in the Unsung Masters Series.

Catherine Breese Davis fills an important but unsung niche in the tradition of women’s poetry in the U.S.—and now unsung no more. The editors of this book have given us a brilliant selection from Davis’s poems, combined with illuminating writings about her work and life. This volume is a true labor of love, a priceless introduction to a lucid, poignant, and unflinching poet. -Annie Finch

Praised by his French contemporaries, Stéphane Mallarmé, André Gide, and Paul Claudel, among others, Jammes would become known among the American Modernists as one of their most essential influences. And then, thanks to the vagaries of time and taste, he and his works were forgotten. Known for his masterful imagery and charming frankness, Jammes’ influence can be seen on the New York School and Deep Image poets.

For over sixty years, poet, composer, dramatist, editor, and music theorist Russell Atkins has been admired by those who know him for his brilliant, idiosyncratic poetry and wide-ranging intellect. All his work, however, was published by small, mostly avant-garde presses and today is completely out of print. This volume reprints a large selection of his poetry, as well as six essays on Atkins, his verse drama The Abortionist, and his essay “A Psychovisual Perspective for ‘Musical’ Composition.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nancy Hale was a writer of literary best-sellers, beloved by critics, and expected by many to become one of the canonical writers of her era. Her fiction helped to shape the early identity of The New Yorker magazine and established her as an important voice in both the short story and the novel. By her death in 1988, however, all but one of her more than thirty books had gone out of print, and her star had faded into near obscurity.

Tamura Ryuichi was a young rabble-rousing Japanese Modernist poet during World War II, profoundly affected by serving on a gun emplacement to defend against an American and Soviet invasion that never came. After the war, Tamura became a "Wasteland" poet, inspired by Westerners such as Eliot and Auden, who published ARECHI, a literary magazine that sought to chart a new course for Japanese poetry. Unknown in the U.S., Tamura is one of the most important Japanese poets of the 20th century.

Dunstan Thompson was once one of the most celebrated poets in America. Published during WWII, his often harrowing, homoerotic poems—many set on the battlefields and hospitals of the European Theater—were compared to the work of Auden, Crane, and Thomas. Then, as far as the general public was concerned, Dunstan Thompson disappeared. This book traces Thompson's journey from a literary enfant terrible to his later years as a writer of mature, meditative, and until now unpublished poetry.