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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn: Serve Your Own Sentences

Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn: Serve Your Own Sentences

Careless, Eleanor
Katz, Daniel
Yao, Steven

Paperback

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics

Literary CriticismPoetry CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 1350421812
ISBN13: 9781350421813
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Aug 20 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Shortlisted for the University English Book Prize 2026

The first full-length study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book consolidates Mendelssohn's reputation as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape.

Mendelssohn was herself incarcerated in Holloway women's prison between 1971-76, and her bold and inventive poetry foregrounds and subverts, but does not triumphantly overcome, conditions of constraint. Informed by extensive original archival research, this book reads her highly experimental lyric alongside the poetry of her forerunners and contemporaries, including Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley, restoring to view a lost network of radical, Jewish and feminist modernism. With chapters on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Women's Liberation Movement, the transformation of HMP Holloway in the 1970s and prison abolitionism, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn illuminates the historical, political and literary contexts that shape this work and argues that Mendelssohn advances a poetics not of emancipation, but of abolition.

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