About the Book
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.
About the Author: Lynn Lonidier was born in Lakeview, Oregon on April 22, 1937. Often describing herself asa "card-carrying anarchafeminist," Lonidier was a teacher, author, multimedia and theater performance artist, and political activist. As a West Coast writer, she was active in the San Francisco literary scene, especially within the lesbian/feminist community, during the 1970s until the time of her death in 1993. Also a musician, she studied composition at the San Francisco State College where, as a cellist, she majored in performance and got a teaching credential. Later she collaborated with Pauline Oliveros at the University of California at San Diego. She also received a M.A. in Media/Education in 1975 from the University of Washington at Seattle. While teaching public school in Oroville, California in the 1960s, Lonidier participated in the "Poet in the Schools" program. She also helped coordinate the Pegasus Program, sponsored by San Francisco State College, that encouraged public school students to write poetry and publish, under Lonidier's direction, numerous chapbooks. In the mid-1960s, Lonidier helped to design a new series in this program that emphasized the use of audiovisual equipment and techniques in the student creation and performance of poetry and "light show-happenings." She was also interested in encouraging the writing of bilingual poetry, especially Spanish/English, to children in San Francisco's Mission District. However, because she was a published lesbian poet in the Bay Area, she used the name of Lynn Summers in the school system from concerns about job security. During the 1970s and 1980s, she also taught, and lectured on feminist topics in writing and multimedia performance in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, especially at the San Francisco Women's Building, of which she was a "Founding Mother." She was also a "light-optics artist" in 1969 for the Electric Circus in New York City and also worked in the same capacity at the 1970 World's Fair, held in Osaka, Japan. This kind of "multimedia" aspect, reflected in the combination of poetry, film, animation, two and three dimensional visual arts and music, in a theatrical or "performance art" setting, characterizes her approach to her life work reflected in this collection. Lonidier was the recipient of a California Arts Councils grant, a member of the Mission Alliance for a Popular Culture. She was associated with the Feminist Writers Guild as well as other Bay Area based writers' organizations and projects, such as the Lavender Rose Collective founded by Judy Grahn. She performed, read, and lectured extensively throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area at such venues as the Women's Building, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, Small Press Traffic as well as many other San Francisco cultural spaces and cafes. She also participated in the 1988 National Poetry Week Festival held in San Francisco. In the early 1990s, she also attended the International Women Writers Conference held in Argentina. Lynn was also a member of a small anarchist group, Mother Courage, which did support work for progressive causes in the Bay Area. Lonidier's published collections of poetry include Clitoris Lost: A Woman's Version of the Creation Myth (1989), The Female Freeway (1970), A Lesbian Estate (1977), Po Tree (1967), and Woman Explorer (1979). Published broadsides include A Jellyfish Swim (1972); Christmas Kitty in Bilingualand, or, What I Did This Year (1986), For Sale: Girl Poet Cheap (1977). She was also published in numerous important poetry journals including The Ladder and the San Francisco Review and poetry collections including She Rises Like the Sun (1989) edited by Janine Canan. Lonidier was also the author of several unpublished novels, plays, and multimedia/theater works which are found in this collection. Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is a scholar and a poet. Her book manuscript, A Fine Bind, is a history of lesbian-feminist presses from 1969 until 2009. Her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, Journal of Lesbian Studies, American Periodicals, WSQ, and Frontiers. She is the co-editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2022). She is the author of four poetry collections, Avowed (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), Lilith's Demons (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2015), Sisterhood (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013) and Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2010). She is editor of The Complete Works of Pat Parker (Sinister Wisdom/A Midsummer Night's Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 (Sinister Wisdom/A Midsummer Night's Press, 2018), and Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2011), which was a finalist for the 2012 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She has her MFA and PhD from the University of Maryland. Enszer edits and publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal, and a regular book reviewer for the The Rumpusand Calyx. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.
