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"Enter into In the Near Distance in the desert where the sounds of a ranch fill the quiet of the day and the night culminates in ""a jubilation of stars."" Find yourself in geographical locales as well as invisible worlds. Make way for truck drivers, states of being, alcoholism, as well as joy. Stay for a while in Appalachia where voices of family and friends from the long-ago, speak in rich, timbered voices. Stay in grief as long as you need to, mourning those who have passed on, those taken by the pandemic. As sorrow finds its level, transcend with the love of dogs, in praise of children who don't listen, and tree-climbing at 67. At the final stop, humble acceptance leaves space to continue discovering and unraveling the unknown."

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"""Aren't we all just a tribe of stars?"" asks Rita Coleman. The poems in Coleman's In the Near Distance lead the reader on her journey, both physical and spiritual, from the distance of the poet's beloved southwest desert to the past of her ancestral Appalachian homeland and the present of the midwestern landscape she now calls home. This is a fearless collection, grappling with subjects such as alcoholism, aging and our recent pandemic with compelling imagery and narrative drive, always grounded with a sense of place.-Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree, winner of the 2023 Virginia Poetry Society North American Book Award . Rita Coleman's In The Near Distance is an elder's report of her life in place and time, from open western landscapes, to the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to the gorgeous Blue Hole of Ohio's Little Miami River. Rita navigates childhood and motherhood, birth and loss, the tiny beauties of the natural world to the darknesses of the pandemic. Through it all, the poet's eyes and ears are alert, and her poems bring us a world really encountered, full of sensual details and feelings. Here is a surprising poem in praise of truck drivers, here a lament about drunkards, here a personal encounter with the ethics of the atomic bomb. These are, as she says in her finale, the ""harvest of this common life."" Readers, I am sure, will appreciate this life's uncommon richness.-Richard Hague, author of Public Hearings and Continued Cases . With lyrical and tonal deftness, In the Near Distance stirs a sense of existential wonder for nature's sacred signs and our vulnerable wandering from home places into geographies beyond. Coleman's family storytelling hammers a hard ""end-strike onto iron,"" often stirring up that ""slipstream between breath and silence"" where we linger alone, struggling for wholeness and redemption. Alive with the forces of creation and personal remembrance, these poems invoke a humble-yet-miraculous interpretation of our individual place in the universe.-Sherry Cook Stanforth, PhD., Managing Editor, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Founder/Director, Originary Arts Initiative"

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