From The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles
THE FORUM, a Los Angeles Weekly, October 1926
We darker folk are by nature a gentle people, content to live and let live, as a rule willing to suffer a lifetime of insult and hardship rather than respond to the voice of our baser natures when that voice advocates violence. The grievous history of our people in this land, as well as our patience enduring trials no human should be called to endure, is common knowledge.
Even the dreamers among us, who upon arriving in this young and vital city, allowed ourselves to believe we had crossed the Jordan and reached the promised land, now find ourselves mired in gloom, fear, and confusion. The despair that took root on Monday, October 11, with the murder of an innocent who harbored ill-will toward none, has since been magnified by the continued silence of the Times, the Examiner, the Express and the Herald. Either none of these institutions possess the courage to report the truth, or all have conspired, for reasons beyond our comprehension, to deceive the same public that pays their salaries, enriches their owners, and relies upon their integrity.
How then can this reporter, though he remains dedicated to the ideal of peace and brotherhood, condemn the desire of a certain element of the darker community in their efforts to organize and prepare for battle, as the enemy has organized into a fraternity of demonic principles and blatant symbolism that flaunts those principles?
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What Mothers Withhold, by Elizabeth Kropf
“The poems of “what mothers withhold” are songs of brokenness and hope in a mother’s voice, poems of the body in its fierceness and failings. Elizabeth Kropf’s poems revel in peeling back silence, and invite us to witness a complicated and traumatic world that is also filled with love.
–Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of “Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems.”
With these visceral poems, poet and mother Elizabeth Kropf has composed a chant of the vocabulary of vulnerability. From fertility to conception to birth—or not—and into motherhood, Kropf’s recounting of her experiences compels the reader to enter and acknowledge the power of what mothers endure and withhold.
–Anne McCrady, author of Letting Myself In and Along Greathouse Road