"[This book] recounts the literary career of Alice Hegan Rice and her poet husband, Cale, in the context of the other writers in Louisville during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It tracks the Rices' exotic travels, including their two trips around the world, and includes their encounters with such well-known fellow writers as Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, Amy Lowell, and Ida Tarbell. Structured on the chronology of Alice's publication history, each chapter narrates a segment of the author's life and contrasts Alice's book published in that period with one or more bestsellers of the same time"--Publisher's website.

Amy Lowell's contemporaries, writing at a time when lesbians were invisible, described her as an old maid. But as Lillian Faderman argues, Lowell wrote "some of the most remarkable, barely encoded, lesbian poems since Sappho," while living in a Boston marriage with her muse, Ada Dwyer Russell. Lady of the Moon offers a combination of three voices on the Boston marriage of Amy Lowell and Ada Dwyer Russell. The first part contains a selection of Lowell's love poems to Ada. The second part contains a scholarly essay by Lillian Faderman that analyzes these poems in relation to Lowell's life. The third part contains a 27-sonnet sequence by Mary Meriam which draws from the first two parts and supports the story with imaginative details. In this jewel of a volume, a great love is reanimated. Imagist Amy Lowell's love poems to actress Ada Russell, pioneering lesbian-feminist scholar Lillian Faderman's landmark essay on Lowell and Russell, and contemporary poet Mary Meriam's heartfelt sonnet sequence speaking to Russell in Lowell's voice, combine to create a remarkable erotic and poetic event. Like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Lowell and Russell had a great creative partnership that made an indelible mark on literary and lesbian history. Lowell called her "tense and urgent love" for Russell an "amethyst garden;" today's readers will find gems of all colors in Lady of the Moon. -Lisa L. Moore, author of Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Lambda Literary Award, 2012), and Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies, The University of Texas at Austin What an erotic trinity! Amy Lowell's fiery poems about Ada Dwyer Russell; Lillian Faderman's illuminating essay about the couple and their "Boston marriage"; and Mary Meriam's contemporary poems in Lowell's lustful voice. Forget "Amygism" and "Patterns": with this brilliantly edited selection of works by and about Amy Lowell, Mary Meriam restores Lowell to her rightful status as a groundbreaking feminist poet. -Julie Kane, National Poetry Series winner and recent Louisiana Poet Laureate Mary Meriam writes as Amy Lowell and her beloved Ada. She imagines, in a variety of sonnet forms, the richness that Lowell removed from her own love poems. While making use of Lowell's language, the sonnets' insistence on the psychological fullness of the two women and their relationship unsettles the century-old sounds so that a sense of quaint mimicry falls quickly by the wayside. The organization of the volume's three parts is astute, though, finally, these sonnets cohere into a whole of their own. -Marcia Karp, poet and translator

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch is a 1901 novel by Alice Hegan Rice, telling of a southern family's humorously coping with poverty. The book was highly popular on its release, and has been adapted to film several times. Rice was inspired to write the book during her "philanthropic work in a Louisville, Kentucky slum area, where she met an optimistic and cheerful woman" who served as the model for the book's main character. In 1904 the book was premiered as a Broadway play starring Madge Carr Cook. As of 1997, the book had sold more than 650,000 copies in a hundred printings.

A national bestseller when first published in 1901, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch endures today as one of the most memorable literary creations by a Kentucky author. This immensely popular novel spawned several movies (with such stars as W.C. Fields and Shirley Temple), countless stage productions, radio shows, and even dolls. Alice Hegan Rice spins the memorable tale of a family struggling against all odds in the Cabbage Patch, an old Louisville slum "where ramshackle cottages played hop-scotch over the railroad tracks." This hopeful story follows the Wiggs as they face eviction from their dilapidated house and take in two orphanage fugitives. Out of print for many years, this charming, funny chronicle of hope triumphing over despair is finally available to a new generation of readers.