Moods
by Mercedes de Acosta

ISBN: 978-1-935835-38-7
Perfect Bound, $14.00
Publication Date: December 2025
5 x 8 inches, 64 pages
PROSE POETRY

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First published in 1919, Moods is Mercedes de Acosta’s first of three books of poetry that appeared in quick succession in the early 1920s. Consciously written as prose vignettes, Moods confounded its publisher and compositor, as well as critics, who were utterly unfamiliar with unlineated poetry. As an adolescent, Mercedes’s sister Rita took her to Paris where she received an informal cultural education from French artists, and undoubtedly gained exposure to French writers as well and their proclivity to petits poèmes en prose. An early precursor stateside was Stuart Merrill’s volume of translations of French prose poems, Pastels in Prose, which was published in 1890. Moods was definitely an oddity in its time, but its structure and language were solidly traditional as opposed to the contemporaneous Kora in Hell: Improvisations by William Carlos Williams. While Acosta’s significance mainly lies in LGBTQ+ history, this slim volume marks a waysign in the development of the American prose poem, creating more open considerations of the history of the genre and poetry itself.

This edition of Moods contains a short introduction by Charles Hanson Towne and a critical afterword by Kathryn Good-Schiff.

From Moods...

MEMORY

Do you know I am living tonight in a cloud of memory? I, who always preach to you of looking forward, am sitting here silently looking backward and tearing the veil from off the dead faces of the past.

Memory is a strange thing, so poignant and alive in its insistence, so dead and lifeless in its reality, so cruel and portentous in its regrets.
It is curious how, merely in the brain, wide vistas of recollection can be opened, and whole pictures of the past stretch before us by simply recalling the touch of a hand, by the stirring of a soft breath of wind, by a sad prolonged street cry, or by the heavy atmospheric pressure of a warm summer’s night.

Sometimes it is a strain of music across far waters that brings back long-distant years; again it is the odor of a box suddenly opened, which gives forth the fragrance of violets or rose leaves long since dead and which instantly brings a tug at the heart strings and fills the throat with burning tears.

It seems to me a comparatively easy thing to suppress our memories during the day, when a host of things come clamoring and crowding for us to accomplish.
But the past, with its sad, tragic eyes and fantastic shapes, its shrill, melancholy wails and dear, dead voices, its heavily perfumed flowers, its vibrating, pulsing music, its soft, caressing touches and maddening, heart-rending regrets — these all come filing back one by one and play upon the soul and make the lips turn white. . . .

Sometimes at night!