Unfinished Spirit

Unfinished Spirit is a bracing work of scholarly devotion. Alongside plenty of original readings and fresh interpretation, Kennedy-Epstein manages the uncanny trick of presenting us with Rukeyser at work, thinking and feeling her way through the catastrophes of her epoch. The reader comes away from the book enlivened and encouraged and enraged.

~Women: A Cultural Review

Adventurous, painstaking, and thought-provoking, Unfinished Spirit will draw students of Rukeyser and twentieth-century American culture to think outside familiar literary historical boxes.

~Modern Philology

Rukeyser's intervention in modernism with this avant-garde novel—and the obstruction of her career by misogynist expectations for women writers—are increasingly the focus of scholars eager to work on something new about the modernist novel and/or the Spanish Civil War.

~Feminist Modernist Studies

A work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship Rukeyser's archival writing provides an invaluable perspective on our times and a guide to moving forward (particularly in our era of revived book banning) with her characteristic belief in possibility, in process and potential.

~The Muriel Rukeyser Living Archive

The importance of Kennedy-Epstein's archival research and recovery of Rukeyser's unpublished and unfinished work cannot be overstated. Unfinished Spirit will be essential to the study of Rukeyser and to left women's writing going forward.

~Against the Current

What Rukeyser did for others—speaking on their behalf, calling their work and their lives to the surface of consciousness—the editors seek to do for her. In The Muriel Rukeyser Era, they revive Rukeyser, and with her, offer a reminder of her times.

~Textual Cultures