Notes for
a Novel
The
Selected Poems of Frieda Fligelman
Alexandra Swaney & Rick Newby, editors
224 pages
$15.95
softcover
ISBN
0-9769684-1-X
Notes
for a Novel is available in fine bookstores
everywhere. To order a copy signed by both editors, send $15.95, plus
$4.05 shipping & handling, to:
Drumlummon Institute
402 Dearborn Ave. #3
Helena, MT 59601
info@drumlummon.org
Born and raised in Helena, Montana, Frieda Fligelman may well be one of the most remarkable unknown poets of the early modern West. Fligelman published only a handful of poems during her lifetime, but at her death she left behind a manuscript of 1,200 exceptional poems. Notes for a Novel offers a rich selection of those passionate, witty, and often heartbreaking poems. Educated at Columbia and in Paris during the 1920s, Frieda Fligelman was a suffragist, translator, advocate for human rights, and founder of the discipline of sociolinguistics.
[Notes for a Novel] bears witness to a western Jewish woman who thought deeply and felt passionately; to the strands of cultural and intellectual electricity in small towns throughout the American West; and to world travelers who find in their natal nests the happiness they’d failed to find elsewhere.
—Harriet
Rochlin, author of A Mixed Chorus:
Jewish Women in the American West, 1849–1924
[Frieda Fligelman’s] greatest strength as a poet is her ability to project a witty and resilient personality, a strong, singular voice that responds anew to adversity and joy. Her poems exhibit the Fligelman persona in many forms: the critic of civilization, the woman, the isolated individual alone in a room. She sought immortality: in her poetry, she is alive.
—Arnie
Malina, recipient,
Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts