Walking Through the River of Fire:  100 Years of Triangle Factory Fire Poems, Edited by Julia Stein with an introduction by Jack Hirschman, 2011

On March 25, 1911, a fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Within the hour 146 immigrant workers—mostly women--were dead. The Triangle fire galvanized a national social justice movement to protect workers’ health and to build unions—relevant today as rights to organize unions are under attack throughout the United States.

 The anthology of poems is organized chronologically:   the first group of poems deals  with the fire itself and those who died, those who survived, and those who witnessed. The next poems describes the funeral, the trial and the organizing for new laws to make it safe to work. The last group of poems looks back at the fire years later—showing how the Triangle fire haunted the next 100 years.

A few days after the Triangle fire in 1911 Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld published in Yiddish his “Memorial to Triangle Fire Victims” on the front page of the Jewish Daily Forward. Then through the work of literary critics Janet Zandy and Karen Kovacik, Stein discovered a new post-1980s generation of poets writing about the Triangle fire. These new Triangle poets are Chris Lllewellyn (1981); Mary Fell (1984); Hilton Obenzinger (1989); Carol Tarlen (1996),  Ruth Daigon (2001);  and Alice Rogoff (2010); and Julia Stein (2010).

 Book out of print.