Nora May French (1881-1907) is an enigmatic and ethereal figure in American poetry and in the poetry of California. Born in Aurora, New York, she came to Los Angeles with her family when she was a little girl, and in the course of her brief and tragic life she lived and wrote more intensely than many who live a full span of years. Her poetry possesses its own kind of cosmic consciousness, aligning it with the work of Clark Ashton Smith and her friend George Sterling. Its delicacy and pathos render it an imperishable monument to the throbbing emotions and aesthetic sensitivity of the woman...

Born, raised, and intellectually and culturally formed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the 1800's, Donald Sidney-Fryer came to the Golden State when he turned twenty-one. During 1956 through 1960 and the summer of 1964, he studied Theatre Arts, French, and Spanish at U.C.L.A., and received his B.A. in French language and literature in September of 1964. His discovery of the prose fictions and poetry of Clark Ashton Smith led to Sidney-Fryer's investigation of that group of poets and fictioneers to which Smith belonged, now known (thanks to Sidney-Fryer) as...

John Thomas Allen and Alan Gullette engage in breaking the levees of the poetic imagination and distilling an ore of ivy bamboo in this almost perversely intense volume. They read like a spell written in hieroglyphs of baking sheet letters spinning without a head. To miss this is to forsake vision, a parasurrealism that sees everything and nothing at once in a small annihilating point. With a foreword by Donald Sidney-Fryer.