The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt

The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt brings together nearly five decades of poetic work. Celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete, much of Solt’s work has remained little known or unpublished. From her lyrical engagement with the “American idiom” of William Carlos Williams to her masterful forays into visual and concrete poetry, this volume, assembled and edited by her daughter Susan Solt, provides an in-depth documentation of a truly original writer who was at the center of some of the most daring global poetic developments of the mid-twentieth century. The centerpiece of The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt is the section “Words and Spaces,” which presents Solt’s concrete poems as she envisioned them: typographically precise, visually stunning, and commanding on the page. As Aram Saroyan writes in his foreword, these poems are “vivid, intimate inventions.” “The Peoplemover 1968,” a series of rarely seen political posters that grapples with the social upheava