Eleanor Careless

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.

In this book, the authors bring to light an exciting range of previously unexplored material from feminist periodicals, in addition to original interviews with the women who made and read them, as they examine the dynamic relationship between feelings, politics and social change. From anger and loneliness to joy and hope, this book makes a powerful case for understanding the shared and contested feelings that have mobilised generations of women activists in the UK.

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.