Lola Ridge, poet, editor, and passionate crusader for social justice, was a fixture of the New York literary avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Before she came to the U.S., Ridge had established herself as a poet and an artist in New Zealand and Australia. Verses is her first collected and reflects her Australasian roots. Ridge’s outspoken political views and vivid, original verse earned her a place of prominence amidst such left-wing reformers and artists as Kay Boyle, John Dos Passos, and Harold Loeb, as well as luminaries of modernist American poetry including William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane. However, since her death in 1941, Ridge’s writing unfortunately has become little more than a footnote to the history of American modernist poetry, and her estate has failed to issue a collected works. Light in Hand, a selection of her early poems, attempts to address this shortcoming in part.