Blood for a Stranger

New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1942. First Edition. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine. Fine in a Near Fine jacket, unclipped ($2.00), toned at the flaps, a few small chips and spots of rubbing at the edges and corners. Red buckram with black ink lettering on the spine. Square and firmly bound, clean internally. Jarrell's first collection of poetry. This is Jarrell's only collection to be published before he joined the Army during World War II, an experience that informed much of his subsequent writing. Still, these poems don't express an entirely optimistic view of the world. As Elizabeth Drew writes in her 1942 review in The Atlantic, "Dying individuals, dying cultures, dying worlds haunt his poems, all crying for life but trapped in death.