Lower East Suicide by Anna Margolin

Translated by Mildred Faintly 

An undiscovered 1929 masterpiece of women’s literature; the first great poetic expression of lesbian love in the modern world, set in Jazz-Age New York City; Symbolist and Decadent fantasmagoria suffuses her work. Hers is a surreal world of ghosts and magic, forgotten gods and paranormal romance; uncannily foreshadows the “confessional” poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; first uncensored translation from the Yiddish

Anna Margolin (1887-1952) was a poet of New York’s early twentieth century Yiddish Renaissance. She lived in Manhattan from 1913 on, and her work, though steeped in Rilke-like Expressionism, fully engages the modern American reality of New York City, from the stores on Fifth Avenue to the El trains to the socialists, gangsters, and artists of the Lower East Side.
In six unambiguously lesbian poems, two of them lengthy, all of them autobiographical, she gives splendid expression to her love for other women.
After publishing a single volume of poetry, acclaimed in the Yiddish-speaking world, she turned her back on literature and functionally committed suicide. Her last published poem was her own epitaph.