The Collected Poems of Mary Ellen Solt

Nearly five decades of work by the beloved American critic and concrete poet best known for her flower-shaped poems

This volume brings together a half century’s worth of work by the renowned American concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt. One of the few Americans, and rare women, in the concrete poetry movement, Solt edited the influential anthology Concrete Poetry: A World View (1968), which brought her to the forefront of that movement not only as a poet but as an acclaimed critic. While Solt was justly celebrated for her suite of visual poems Flowers in Concrete (1966), much of her work has remained little known or unpublished. From her lyrical engagement with the idiom of William Carlos Williams to her masterful forays into visual and concrete poetry, this volume, assembled and edited by her daughter Susan Solt, provides an in-depth document of a truly singular writer who was at the center of some of the most daring global poetic developments of the mid-20th century. The centerpiece is the section “Words and Spaces,” which presents Solt’s concrete poems as she envisioned them: typographically precise, visually stunning and commanding on the page.
Mary Ellen Solt (1920–2007) was a writer, a scholar and an early practitioner of concrete poetry. Solt authored several poetry collections including A Trilogy of Rain (1970) and The Peoplemover 1968: A Demonstration Poem (1978). Her flower poems have been exhibited internationally, most recently at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Getty Center in 2017.