' Body Sweats remaps the frontiers of modernism. Many of the poems are themselves art objects, decorated in red and green ink, adorned with sketches and diagrams, presented with the same visceral immediacy they had when they were composed. The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and coeditor Suzanne Zelazo have assembled 150 poems, most of them never before published. Published more than a century after her arrival in New York, Body Sweats is the first major collection of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poems in English. When she tired of existing words, she created new ones: 'phalluspistol,' 'spinsterlollipop,' 'kissambushed.' The Baroness's rebellious, highly sexed howls prefigured the Beats her intensity and psychological complexity anticipates the poetic utterances of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Her love poetry muses graphically on ejaculation, orgasm, and oral sex. With its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, her poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself.

As a poet, she was profane and playfully obscene, imagining a farting God, and transforming her contemporary Marcel Duchamp into M'ars (my arse).

Her delirious verse flabbergasted New Yorkers as much as her flamboyant persona. As an agent provocateur within New York's modernist revolution, 'the first American Dada' not only dressed and behaved with purposeful outrageousness, but she set an example that went well beyond the eccentric divas of the twenty-first century, including her conceptual descendant, Lady Gaga. Gammel is also a regular contributor to the public media with over 100 radio, television, and newspapers interview contributions including BBC, CBC, PBS, TVO, Newsweek, Globe & Mail, Toronto Star, and Deutschlandradio.The first major collection of poetry written in English by the flabbergasting and flamboyant Baroness Elsa, 'the first American Dada.' As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven left in her wake a ripple that is becoming a rip-one hundred years after she exploded onto the New York art scene.

Martin's Press), Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (Book*Hug), and Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press). Internationally renowned for her scholarship in the areas of gender, modernism, and the avant-garde, she is the author and editor of 15 books, including I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (MIT Press), Looking for Anne of Green Gables (St. Irene Gammel is a Professor of Modernism at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she directs the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre and held the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture (2005-2018).

Baroness Elsa by Irene Gammel