A bold intervention in the literary politics of the twentieth century. With startling clarity, Kennedy-Epstein reclaims Muriel Rukeyser's unfinished spirit for our troubled time. What readerly pleasure! What an archival feast!

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, through original readings of Muriel Rukeyser's rejected, unfinished, and unpublished works, provides a new understanding of the gender politics of modernism and midcentury American letters, underscoring both Rukeyser's significance as a feminist artist and the importance of recovering writings lost because of conventionality and misogyny.

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein's Muriel Rukeyser is 'a big angry woman' who takes up crucial space, who defied readers' reports deeming her writing to be 'abnormal' and 'a waste of time.' This book presents the true fullness of Rukeyser for the first time, making exciting use of the vast archive of unfinished texts, which—despite belated, increasing recognition of the poet's importance—have been mostly left unread. Rukeyser was up against Cold War anticommunism, combined with conservative antimodernism, which kept her work out on the margins, yes; but more, she confronted openly derisive gender bias and literary-infrastructural forces of the 'power culture' distorting her career and reputation in real time. Rukeyser's response, Kennedy-Epstein shows, was to assume innovatively a special powerful critical stance, and it is from that stance—sharing it with the poet herself—that this book begins, continues, concludes, and will make its mark.

Unfinished Spirit is a radical and original work of living scholarship, refiguring how we think of twentieth-century literary history through the submerged oeuvre of this fascinating, uncategorizable writer. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein's rigorous and imaginative approach challenges the power structures that sought to contain Muriel Rukeyser's work, and makes an utterly compelling case for its non-conformist spirit and political prescience.

Kennedy-Epstein has written a book for our time. In Unfinished Spirit, she honors Rukeyser's visionary power and brazenly matches that power with deft archival research and political acumen that is as rigorous as it is intrinsically embodied. Across lost pages and histories overlooked, through war and ongoing injustice, we come to 'feel our complicated present,' and so Unfinished Spirit is also a book for our future.

Inviting us into the unfinished, ambitious, and hope-infused work in Muriel Rukeyser's long-neglected archive, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein's vital book captures the moment when 'a woman would encounter another woman's work and have the authority to deem it valuable.' Unfinished Spirit restores Rukeyser's priceless, singular vision to literary history and plants it in the present, like a seed, for our literary future.

What if the moment of modernist poetry had been named the Rukeyser era rather than the Pound era? Unfinished Spirit persuasively imagines this alternative history. In her audacious book, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein upends the customary single-author study, focusing on the archive of Rukeyser's unfinished, rebuffed, and disregarded projects. In refreshingly forthright terms, Kennedy-Epstein chronicles an era of patriarchal dismissals and institutional indifference to the intellectual life of women. Rukeyser emerges as a seriously underserved major author, and the unique investigative approach opens up a new perspective on what archival research has to offer. Unfinished Spirit is both an exegesis and a meditation on how to "nourish the process" extolled by Rukeyser, extended here in a work of sympathetic investigation that transforms the way modernism, the twentieth century, the Cold War, and communism are understood.