A posthumous collection of poetry by Lynn Lonidier (1937-1993), exemplifying her lifelong commitment to linguistic innovations and radical reconfigurations of sexuality and gender.
A Five Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems gathers work from Lonidier's six poetry collections, now entirely out of print. A self-described "card-carrying anarchafeminist" who experimented in multimedia, theater performance, fiction, and music, Lonidier is rarely mentioned with her poetic, intellectual, and political cohorts. This collection seeks to recontextualize Lonidier's work for contemporary evaluation and invite a new generations of readers. Rich with wit, humor, originality, and play, Fire-Rimmed Eden links multiple poetic constellations of the 1970s and 1980s, from the narrative impulses of the feminist and lesbian poetry movements as characterized by Audre Lorde and Judy Grahn, to the experimental impulses of Robert Duncan and Etel Adnan.
*Of interest to those reading about inter-genre experimental works influenced by multimedia, performance theater, music, film and art.
*Of interest to people invested in the intersection of political activism and art/literature, in histories of feminist/lesbian art and activism of the 70s and 80s in San Francisco, those seeking to enrich and broaden the canon to include underlooked lesbian writers working during this period.
*Editor first encountered the work of Lonidier while doing research for her dissertation, reading in the papers of Barbara Grier at the San Francisco Public Library. She developed interest in Lonidier's work for being concrete in the spirit of May Swenson's Iconographs while also performative in the spirit of Jerome Rothenberg.
*Editor is a respected academic, archivist and excavator of feminist history and poetry, as well as the the publisher of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian and literary art journal
*Editor won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry for The Complete Works of Pat Parker (Sinister Wisdom/A Midsummer Night's Press, 2016).
*Editor was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry for Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2011).
*Editor is Regular book reviewer for The Rumpus and Calyx.
*Editor is on the board of directors of Split This Rock.
*Editor is on the OutWrite committee at the DC LGBT Center, at the University of Mississippi in the Sarah Isom Center.
*Editor has participated in various Lambda Literary grants and awards panels.
*Author is currently an instructor in Women's Studies at the University of Mississippi; previously taught at the New College of Florida and the University of Maryland.
*Author holds an MFA and PhD from the University of Maryland.
"Lynn Lonidier remains for me, for us, one of that company of poets who has shaped an image-of-the-world we now can recognize as true & in ways we hadn't known before she showed them to us."-Jerome Rothenberg
"Lynn Lonidier's last poems take the reader on a wild ride into a rich, multi-leveled world of wit, beauty, and breath-taking linguistic abundance. Her best are reminiscent of a Joyce gone lesbian and lyrical, yet at the same time the originality of her voice, (particularly her experiments in Spanglais), place her firmly in the uniquely bilingual, rapturously political landscape of fin de siecle San Francisco."-Mary Mackey
"Full of surprising oddities and ever-shifting styles, Lonidier's work investigates concerns immediate to her own affairs... This gritty determination to measure her work against her own personal experiences "in the cold light of truth" is what makes reading Lonidier's poetry, at its most compelling and convincing moments, so riveting."-Patrick James Dunagan, SFMoMA's Open Space
