Edited by Sara Crangle
Published 2020. Paperback, 780pp, 8.5 x 8.5ins, £40.00 / $65
ISBN 9781848617148 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

Author and artist Anna Mendelssohn was born near Manchester in 1948. Between 1971 and 1976, she served time in London’s Holloway Prison due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the 1980s, she resided and studied in Cambridge, publishing 15 poetry collections and contributing to landmark anthologies of the British Poetry Revival, among them, Denise Riley’s Poets on Writing (1992) and Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of Chaos (1996). After her death in 2009, her children donated her archive to the University of Sussex.
In theme and style, Mendelssohn’s poems draw on an expansive, post-1850 avant-garde lineage that includes Baudelaire, Stein, Akhmatova, Hikmet, Lorca, and Raworth. Attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, Mendelssohn’s poems are charged, acute, and probing. Part aesthetic treatise (“a poem is not going to give precise directions”); part antipolitical manifesto (“the war is too close / for revolution to be understood”); part lament (“softly the sound of woe / gallops”); part celebration of poetic sound and possibility (“I worship at the shrine of poetry”), Mendelssohn’s writing resolutely resists containment or category. This scholarly edition is the first replete collection of the poems Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation.

"I welcome this book. The poetry of Anna Mendelssohn is remarkable on so many different levels, at times disquieting and surprising but always abiding in its pursuit of truth while questioning the forms through which truth can be known (including any desire for its own inconsolability). Either way, the quality of the poetry is never beyond doubt and it is great to see its achievement across the body of work." —D. S. Marriott

"Grace Lake's poetry rages beneath the proscriptions of law – the violence of identifiers. The poetry speaks these proscriptions out loud, whilst simultaneously satirising and stupefying its agents - the police chief reduced to a fleece-clad administrator frisking the septuagint. This is a poetry that articulates remorseless attacks on the “I”, the subject ever veering in and out of sight, dodging bureaucrats, judges and literary theorists. It is a poetics that sings its world, really beautifully, rending and reciting its life beyond every damned circumstance." —Verity Spott

"Until now, the legend of Anna Mendelssohn has tended to loom larger than awareness of and engagement with her poetry. All this will change with the arrival of the Shearsman edition, which prints for the first time an extraordinary array of previously unknown texts that are among the most singular, inventive, and impassioned artworks of the last half century. Sara Crangle’s editorial work is eye-popping in scale and consistently revelatory. In short, this is nothing less than a landmark in publishing history, an important document of the times, and a major work of scholarship." —Rod Mengham

"Some questions, towards a reading of I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn : What will it take for the “magnesium blue” to reverse itself, transgressing body boundary after body boundary in order to appear, deposited yet hovering above the floor? How do you live when your oesophagus is a staircase in an abandoned building? (“A portrait of throated wires...”) How do you write when there’s nothing left? In Sara Crangle's attentive and beautiful introduction, two lines, an “affective refrain”, are emotional to read: “I want to / be thinking and speaking in another language. I turn into a machine / in this language.” Here, the poet's biological eternity has reached its limit; it’s the poems that will survive something the person writing them cannot." —Bhanu Kapil

Sara Crangle is Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex. Her books include Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (Dalkey, 2011), and, with Peter Nicholls, On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (Bloomsbury, 2012).

See review in Blackbox Manifold here.

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