"Distant Music," Poems by Joan Annsfire

Distant Music

My poetry collection, Distant Music has finally arrived. The poems in this collection span over twenty years of my experience of trying to live fully and honestly. They encompass relationships, illness, travel and coming to terms with lesbian identity. But the main focus here is the time-limited nature of this journey. It is the thread that weaves these poems together to illuminate the complex, painful and wondrous nature of all our short and fragile lives.

Thanks so much to Mary Meriam and Risa Denenberg of Headmistress Press and the four reviewers whose blurbs were excerpted on the cover: Carolyn Boll, G.L.Morrison, Ann Tweedy and Julie R. Enszer.
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Reviewer's Blurbs:

The dance of light and shadow unfolds across each and every page of Joan Annsfire’s Distant Music. Life and death, love and loss, and the shifting patterns of time and memory, hope and regret, all swell, surge and release as steps are taken, hands are held, a face is stroked, a life is lived and examined, and a poet is born again and again, poem by poem, word by word. The movement of a revolution. The revolution of a world. A world within. And without. Distant Music is a compelling and moving collection of poems that draws us forward from beginning to end. And beginning again.
—Carolyn Boll, poet/writer/dancer

Distant Music is no “carnival of disorder...seducing with a wild and discordant song.” There is order to these poems. They become a history, a feral memoir, the travel diary of a revolutionary. A travelogue navigating the white-waters of time through the sharp hazards of health and family and love. These are companionable poems (though sometime reckless companions) that invite you to swim naked or leap from bridges. They sing of geography’s immutability; memory’s flexibility and betrayals of the body; but ultimately these poems sing of survival. While they lay flowers at the side of the road for peoples and things that didn’t survive the journey, these are poems of passionate endurance.
—G.L. Morrison, author of Chiaroscuro Kisses

Distant Music is full of visceral, surprising images. If you’re brave enough to stay the course, Joan Annsfire will take you “joyriding on the rushing rapids,” through the “searing pain” of childhood and a stigmatized youth, through the speaker’s mother’s illness and death from cancer and then her own diagnosis and recovery, finally to land in “an older body, baggy, stretched and / soft as a favorite pair of flannel pajamas . . .” Annsfire’s is a world where “intense, immeasurable hunger” is an “elusive prize” in pursuit of which one must “scour the earth.” The reader who scours these pages will be enriched by Annsfire’s wisdom, her skilled use of metaphor and language, and her jarring honesty.
—Ann Tweedy, author of White Out and Beleaguered Oases

In Distant Music, Joan Annsfire’s poems dance with delicate intimacy and shout their angry love. A long-awaited collection from the widely published, Berkeley poet, Distant Music is filled with poems to savor and enjoy.
—Julie R. Enszer, author of Sisterhood, editor/publisher of Sinister Wisdom