Description
LONGING DISTANCE, Poems of Love, Lust & Geography
by Joanie Puma
$19.99, Full-length, paper
978-1-63534-558-2
2018
Joanie Puma was a staff writer for The New Yorker in the 1970s and ’80s. Her writing has also appeared in Grand Street, Wigwag, Baseball Monologues (Heinemann Books), and The New York Times. She recently completed a comic-mystical novel, The Myth of the Normal Person, and lives near the east slope of the Bighorn Mountains, north central Wyoming’s apostrophic range, where it’s about the sky—the sky—the sky.
Mary Strong Jackson (verified owner) –
Joanie Puma’s book of poems Longing Distance: Poems of Lust, Love and Geography give readers everything the title promises. She takes us on sensual rides making our eyes squint in the sun and details of landscapes causing us to gasp. And she does it all in a flow and beat using words of longing and familiarity helping us realize we have felt the same, and heard what she has heard as in “shushing, hissing, rattling, howling cottonwoods”. The trees she compares to the city, “their blinking, blaring, flashy, talky light bulb leaves is nature’s answer to the Las Vegas strip at night”.
In “Searching for Anasazi Slim” Puma pulls us to the past and present in an off-road blues trip into landscapes where Anasazi people “sipped lemonade from their front porch,/ gazed out over 60 foot drop at canyons, washes, reds, blue-greens,/ and listened to Anasazi Slim’s latest hits”.
In the same poem in one stanza we are bounced scraped and slowed down “Bouncing in out, out red sand ruts/, pinon and sage limbs scrape the doors, slow us/snare, snag us off the undulating trail,/stop us before we spin our wheels/
Then she gives us more music! “bouncing along, four beats to the bar/,Twelve bars to the song, bent notes/Harmonica breaks, baritone wails, shuffling trap drums/until we leave the car, plunge into the desert up, down/.
Puma’s work reminds us we have five senses and reading her poems enlivens every sense. Each line is a poem. She does not wrap up an ending she writes words that go for the throat as in this poem’s ending…after which they’ll spit out their toothpicks in the direction of each other’s jugular/and go back to their offices”.
Her titles, “Snake-Effect Lows: Lesson From Bozeman, Montana” catch our attention, and her humor helps us laugh at our own past love experiences. The last stanza from this title,
The lessons:
1)I believe anything
a smart, funny man I’m attracted to
tells me.
2) I’m hyperactive and batty.
3) Never tuck in the blankets.
Joanie Puma is a poet to read. Her originality flows from the page reminding us we are alive in a vibrant world. A world beckoning us to see, hear, touch, smell and taste.
Mary Strong Jackson