Author and artist A NNA M ENDELSSOHN (1948-2009) was born near Manchester. 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 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 anti-political 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.