Comrade Muriel

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s new book,Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Reading across genres and forms, Kennedy-Epstein focuses on four thwarted projects: Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War-era novel Savage Coast, unpublished in her lifetime; a clutch of lectures, radio talks, and essays that illuminate Rukeyser’s sexual politics; collaborative work with her lover, the photographer Berenice Abbott; and a biography of the anthropologist Franz Boas. In each case, Kennedy-Epstein traces Rukeyser’s resourceful struggle against ‘the sexism of editors, the withdrawal of publishing contracts, political censure [and] derision’ (7). The result of ten years of archival work, almost every page bristles with evidence drawn from letters, unpublished interviews, and marginalia. This material isn’t brandished as a trophy but woven into the argument of the book, which shows us that what doesn’t come to fruition isn’t simply waste, and that ‘waste’ is itself a highly ideological concept. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The first part of the book – three taut chapters – is organized around Rukeyser’s experiences in Spain, where she travelled in 1936 for the opening of the antifascist People’s Olympiad. Dedicated readers of Rukeyser will be aware of some of this terrain already, thanks in part to KennedyEpstein’s own editorial work. Her edition of Savage Coast appeared in 2013 with the Feminist Press, and helped to introduce Rukeyser’s writing to a new generation of activists and poets. This recovery work originated in the activities of the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Lost & Found, which has been an inspiration for anyone working on experimental poetry in the long aftermath of the financial crisis. Kennedy-Epstein’s contribution to the series, Barcelona, 1936: Selections from Muriel Rukeyser’s Spanish Civil War Archive (2011), joined work by other scholars on Diane Di Prima, Margaret Randall, John Wieners, Jean Sénac, June Rowena KennedyEpstein, Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, 2022, 224 pp., 13 illustrations, 9781501762338