The Writings of Emilie Glen 4: Poems from Manuscripts

This fourth and final volume collects all the unpublished manuscripts left by New York poet Emilie Glen. These 180 poems, lyric and narrative, far from being the bottom drawer of the poet’s work, contain the same urban savor as her longer works. Some of these poems were read by tyhe poet repeatedly at the poetry salon she ran in Greenwich Village, and prior to that, at the salon she ran at her high-rise apartment on the Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s. As always, her most engaging poems are miniature short stories, all set against a noir Manhattan that includes both shocking murders as well as moments of unexpected beauty among fire escapes, trash cans, alley cats, and the migratory birds in Central Park. The book includes several surprisingly experimental works and a true account of a horrifying psychopath who ran a Greenwich Village coffee house. The Emilie Glen we know from the first three volumes is still here in spades: poet, actress, pianist, bird-watcher, cat-lover, nature rhapsodist, the woman of Manhattan with a piercing eye for character and image. She is the city, the street, the windows, the bridges and tunnels, the parks and fountains, the desperate dreamers on the doorsteps.