The title poem portrays the Jewish immigrant community of Hester Street in the Lower East Side of New York, where Ridge lived for a time.

[6] It explores the effects of capitalism, gender, and generational conflict in ways that bear comparison to the works of Charles Reznikoff.

This recognition led to opportunities for Ridge; she became involved with and edited new avant-garde magazines such as Others in 1919, and Broom, founded in 1921 by Harold Loeb, for which she was the American editor from 1922 to 1923, while he published in Rome.

[6][4] Ridge published 61 poems from 1908 to 1937 in such leading magazines as Poetry, New Republic, The Saturday Review of Literature and Mother Earth.

In the 1930s, she supported the defence of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.

Her actions during the demonstration in front of the prison on the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed were described by Katherine Anne Porter in her long essay, "The Never Ending Wrong."

She wrote, "One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse's hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still.

Without any words or a moment's pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious.

Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as "the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism.

Tobin notes that Ridge was, "part of the confluence of politics, culture and the burgeoning of women's voices at the advent of modernism to the start of World War II.

"[4] Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote that contemporary readers need, "to appreciate the magnitude and freshness of her enterprise: to make poetry out of the actual city.

"[2] Pinsky likens Ridge to 18th-century British poet William Blake in her ability to express the perspective of children, evoking, "innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them.