Selected Poems

These poems pulse with the particular urgency of a woman writing honestly about love, loss, and the making of a self in the years after the Great War. Marion Strobel was an associate editor at Poetry magazine, and her work there clearly shaped her own rigorous, precise approach to language, each poem stripped to its essential elements yet somehow still alive with feeling. The poems gathered here, published between 1919 and 1926, move through the intimacies of personal relationships and the uncharted territory of new motherhood with a frankness that feels almost radical for the era. They capture the texture of modern urban life, the streetcars, the newspapers, the small moments that make up a day, while never losing sight of the emotional truth beneath. Strobel writes about parenthood not as sentiment but as revelation, as disruption, as the unmaking and remaking of identity. For readers who want poetry that is precise without being cold, that engages with the modern world without abandoning lyric depth, these are essential voices from a moment when American poetry was remaking itself.