“A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams” San Francisco Bay Press, Virginia/San Francisco: 2009

Published by San Francisco Bay Press
Publication Date: January 6, 2009
Paperback: $ 14.99, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-60461-009-3

BOOK SYNOPSIS
In her second full-length poetry collection, Joan Gelfand explores the poignancy of living in a world that is war-torn and environmentally damaged. With a nod to the humorous paradox of modern life, Gelfand writes from the vantage point of a mother, an artist, and a Zen meditator. “A Dreamer’s Guide…” looks beyond the surface of our lives at the connections that make life worth living, and the sensual details that color it.

San Francisco, CA. — Joan Gelfand’s second poetry collection, A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, is earthy and mystical, leaving readers longing for love, beauty and the natural world. Gelfand’s use of sensual, evocative language opens readers to deep, startling feelings.

Many works in “A Dreamer’s Guide…” are simply about the language and the observation of small, intimate details of daily life while poems such as “Requiem for a Dying Planet,” and “War Rant” open our souls to the urge to be a part of something bigger, and more humane. Joan’s work has been compared with Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Stephen Dunn.

A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, which will be published by San Francisco Bay Press on January 6, 2009 (ISBN 978-1-60461-009; Paperback, $14.99, 58 pages) will be available through online booksellers, Baker & Taylor, and Ingram.

Advance praise for A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams:

‘… In that space between day and night / Romance and expectation loiter.’ Loiter. Yes. On such smooth and well-charged turns, Joan Gelfand’s poems vibrate, shudder or take flight, roaring and purring to safe and not so safe landings in the heart, in the gut. Readers, beware. This is powerful stuff.”

–Al Young, California State Poet Laureate

A Dreamer’s Guide to Cities and Streams, Joan Gelfand’s latest collection of poems, is a remarkable journey. With an artist’s eye and a seeker’s soul she takes the reader from Tuscan olive groves to a family’s Seder table. Using humor and introspection she asks questions, states opinions and tell tales all which leave one – to quote the award winning “Anthology Sonnet” – with “a delicious taste that lingers.”

–Martha Meltzer, Pleasanton Poet Laureate

Two years ago I found Gelfand’s first book, Seeking Center, a slim volume that was my first encounter with poetry that spoke to me on a personal level. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book infused the wellspring of my own inspiration when I was just beginning to believe in the power of poetry to transform a life, my own in particular. I am thrilled to welcome this new book in which poems like “Ode to Cecil Bruner” and “Seven X Seven” once again remind me of something I might have dreamed or written from my own life if I’d only had the words.

—Rebecca Foust, author of Dark Card (Texas Review Press 2008), winner of 2007 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and Allegheny Mountain Bowl(forthcoming from Main Street Rag in 2008).

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Seeking Center: A Collection of Poems by Joan Gelfand, Two Bridges Press, Richmond CA: 2006

In Seeking Center, Joan Gelfand joins the reader in a free-wheeling discussion, beyond the poems themselves, regarding what is poetry today, here at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In forms that span from the short, highly-constrained haiku to the almost limitless prose poem, she seems to define poems as she produces them.

These poems reach widely into media other than the printed word, thus knitting a web of connections between arts and artists. “Museum Pieces,” the first of four sections, deals almost exclusively with reactions to visual art. At her best, Gelfand expresses the ability of a work of art to shock our prosaic universe. In the opening poem she begins:

Across the dirty street from “Heavenly Body:
Quality Collision Repair and Refinishing,”
A feather-light whale
Floats.

By grounding the reader in the dirty streets, Gelfand juxtaposes ‘’art” that ethereal, non-linear, always moving target. She uses a similar technique in “Monet,” but instead of using third person she employs a strong authorial presence:

How many times have I seen you
And not seen you?
Today, your subtle colors whisper —
Not the gardens, not the water lilies —

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