Los Angeles Times selection for one of the hundred best books of 2003

“First and foremost Poets of the Non-Existent City is an homage to an era and a place, Los Angeles, and to the dedicated few who worked to create a free society during the shameful decade of McCarthy. At the center was a group of very worthy but forgotten poets, chief among them Tom McGrath. One of those extraordinary books that leads you to other extraordinary books you didn’t know existed. The illustrations alone are worth the price of entry.” (New Mexico)
-Philip Levine

Thomas McGrath: Statement to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and
excerpt from "Letter to an Imaginary Friend"

William Pillin: "Ocean Park"

Note, they are poems of the West not poets of the West, which gives Robert Mezey free rein to include musings on the great frontier from Apollinaire, Bertolt Brecht and Zbigniew Herbert as well as from Kenneth Rexroth, James Wright, Virginia Hamiton Adair and M. Scott Momaday.

The explorations, from dates of birth 1874 to 1961, begin with Robert Frost and wind up among Lynn Emanuel, Alberto Rios, David St. John and, finally, Joe Bolton.

R. Mezey includes a marvelous selection of tribal poems.

Chippewa: "Sometimes I go about"

Larry Levis: "The Poet at Seventeen"

Dick Barnes: "On a Painting by David Hockney"

Among those confronting the mystery of contemporary poetry and litererature Dana Gioia has asserted himself as one of the most versatile and persistent investigators on the case. With co-editor Chryss Yost he draws together several recent newspaper and magazine articles and essays touching upon aspects of literary Los Angeles.

Says Gioia, "We want to get at the Los Angeles that came after the gumshoes, the wisecracking Englishmen, after the Boosters, the Beats, and the boozers, after the despairing herioines of Joan Didion and the coked-up rich kids of Bret Easton Ellis. What is literary Los Angeles about now?"

The resulting selection suggests we L.A. writers might be in the throes of something, we know not what -- not yet. In any case, the collection seems an important historical document marking time between the Last Big Things and the great What's Next.

The editors include a judiciously edited sampler of eleven poems.

Chryss Yost: "Escaping from Autopia"

Gina Valdéz: English Con Salsa

"By the time I entered graduate school in 1974, there was a style associated with Fresno poetry, almost as if one could say there was a Fresno School, as there was a New York School, of poets. That is not the case, of course. But it is clear to me that without Philip Levine's presence, the importance of poetry coming from Fresno would have been diminished. . . . Why else did Larry Levis have his canny sense of class consciousness, mixed with surreal imagery, and a shrewd colloquial voice? Why else did Gary Soto present to the poetry world the clipped., free verse lyrics of a working class Hispanic who knew the earth and weather of the San Joaquin? Why else did David St. John weave together intricate narratives pivoting on conditional tenses of the imagination?" - Mark Jarman

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"At one level, these are poems of Fresno. They surprise the reader into seeing how a superb, various art has emerged form one part of California. They revel in the actual. They show the tract homes, the fruit orchards, the farms, the scalding summers. But at a more important level, How Much Earth proves one of the oldest truths of language; that the here-and-now and the local have the best sort of kinship with the infinite. Everyone who knows that they came from somewhere will be moved, enchanted, and confirmed by this book." - Eavan Boland

Roberta Spear: “The White Dress”

Luis Omar Salinas: “Last Tango in Fresno”

Philip Levine: “The Poem of Chalk”