California Dreams: Poems 1953-1981 (2019)—Sandol Stoddard moved freely among several genres during her career, while reserving in her private journals a treasure trove of poetry. The poems collected in California Dreams provide an extraordinary narrative of her development as a writer. An English lit major with a diverse portfolio, she spent years polishing these poems, then almost furtively revealed their secrets in this collection first shared only with family. She returned later in life to revise them for publication, then cleared her files of all surviving drafts. The resulting posthumous volume chronicles her journey west in search of an artist’s Eden and offers something of a Rosetta stone to translate the deeper meanings of themes she explored for decades: life, love, laughter, motherhood, God and death.