Fog

Lola Ridge arrived in New York City as a young immigrant and found poetry in its meanest streets. In "Fog," she transforms the city's suffocating mist into something visceral and alive. The poem pulses with early 20th-century Manhattan: its cramped tenements, its clanging Elevated trains, the anonymity of crowds moving through grey murk. Ridge doesn't prettify the urban poor or romanticize their struggles. She renders the ghetto's density and desperation with unflinching precision, finding in fog a perfect metaphor for the way poverty obscures, suffocates, and isolates. This is modernist poetry at its most democratic. Ridge wrote for and about the working-class immigrants who built New York, capturing their language, their rhythms, their exhaustion. The poem endures because it refuses to look away. For readers who want poetry that feels like standing on a street corner in 1918, breathing the same air as the people who lived there, "Fog" remains essential.