Infelicia

Adah Isaacs Menken lived like a thunderstorm and wrote with the same ferocity. Born into uncertain circumstances in the American South, she became an actress, journalist, and poet who scandalized and thrilled 1860s America. Infelicia, published the year she died at thirty-three, collects her radical, restless verse: poems that rage against the chains binding women and Black Americans, that wrestle with her Jewish identity, that chronicle a nation tearing itself apart during the Civil War. But she could also write with startling tenderness about desire and death and the loneliness of the artist. These poems don't apologize. They stare you down. Menken was impossible to categorize in life, and her poetry refuses easy classification now: fierce, intimate, politically incandescent, unafraid to be personal or prophetic. She burned bright and left these poems as proof she was here.