Dorothy Parker master of the short story dramatist screenwriter and sharp-tongued critic was also an accomplished poet. At the center of the famed Round Table at New York's Algonquin Hotel Parker distinguished herself among a circle of urbane literati with her excoriating quips and wonderfully realized epigrammatic poems. By the time her first collection of poems Enough Rope was published in 1926 she had been dubbed the "wittiest woman in America".Confronting the hard facts of existence facing a woman of talent and boldness in the 1920s and '30s Parker's poems depict a world haunted by unrequited love alcohol razor blades and men of overbearing will. Her poetry earned much admiration from critics such as Odgen Nash Somerset Maugham and Edmund Wilson who hailed it as "flatly brutal as the wit of the age of Pope". Complete Poems collects Parker's three volumes of poetry Enough Rope Sunset Gun and Death and Taxes as well as a hundred other previously uncollected works -- such as the "hate songs" compact satiric descriptions of husbands and wives actors and politicians bores and ne'er-do-wells and others who attracted her barbed pen.
