The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of subjects ranging from the hardships of the Great Depression and the experience of war to the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. More than fifty of Rolfe's best poems - some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly satiric - are included in Trees Became Torches, a book designed to reach a broader audience than the recently published Collected Poems.

Rolfe was widely known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the 1936-39 civil war.