Crystal Flowers by Florine Stettheimer, Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo

Department of Reissue No. 5

Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) was an American modernist of German-Jewish heritage living in New York. She was a painter, designer, and poet. Together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted a legendary salon on the Upper West Side, where they entertained the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Carl Van Vechten, Henri McBride, and Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1934 Stettheimer designed the set and costumes for Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts to much acclaim. In 1949, Ettie collected Florine’s poems in Crystal Flowers, a privately printed, elegant edition of 250. In addition to these rare poems, this new volume offers formerly unpublished material culled from archives, including three new poems and Stettheimer’s libretto for her ballet “Orphée of the Quat-z-arts.” Gammel and Zelazo have re-situated this overlooked poet among her modernist sisters, presenting her as an important practitioner of a modernism that integrates multiple art forms. Sixty years after it first appeared for a select few, her poetry shines for a new generation of readers ready to appreciate her irreverent camp aesthetic and her exuberant painterly style.

Irene Gammel is a literary historian, biographer, and curator. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto. She is the author of numerous books including Baroness Elsa, a biography of New York Dada artist and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Looking for Anne, revealing the hidden life of Canadian author L.M. Montgomery during the writing of her classic novel Anne of Green Gables.

Suzanne Zelazo is a poet and postdoctoral fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, Ryerson University, where she researches avant-garde women’s poetics and performance. She is the author of Parlance, a volume of poetry channeling, among others, Leonard Cohen and Virginia Woolf.

Contains one Photographic Plate