[11/11/26] Robinson, Elizabeth: Being Modernists Together

Wesleyan University Press, paperback

Publication Date: November 11, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

"With a glancing nod to Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon's classic Being Geniuses Together, Elizabeth Robinson tells the story differently, expanding the roster of modernists (and geniuses) to focus on people with a wide range of visions for an alternative society―artists, LGTBQIA+ avant la lettre, Resistance fighters in WWII, Republican supporters in the Spanish Civil War, early Civil Rights activists The balance of biographical vignette and poetic flight makes it a page-turner―essential reading for understanding the origins of our contemporary battles for an inclusive society and alternatives to the capitalist status quo."―Cole Swensen

"Surprising, transgressive, and playful, Being Modernists Together brings poetic parataxis to the archives themselves, as Robinson sets into motion a poetry of improbable conversations between various personae across distances of industry, gender, and race. Part gossip column, shadow story, and critical history, the collection proposes a curious and profound intertextuality of the personal and peripheral, creating an unexpected and beguiling web of both language and marginalia that Robinson attentively strums, divining her way into music."―Jennifer Cheng

"Channeling modernism's writers, artists, thinkers, Elizabeth Robinson is a lyric vehicle no less brilliantly tuned than Orpheus's Rolls-Royce radio. Each poem in Being Modernists Together transmits its subject's unique frequency while showing the individual to be nothing without encounter: The expansive sense of company offered hereinvites us to understand the imagination as conduit for affiliation more powerful than the boundaries that isolate us."―Karla Kelsey