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"