The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature

Karen Paul Holmes: No Such Thing as Distance (book)

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Karen Paul Holmes’s No Such Thing as Distance

Karen Paul Holmes is the author of Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press 2014). She is a past recipient of an Elizabeth GeorgeFoundation writing grant and was named a “Best Emerging Poet” by Stay Thirsty Mediapage1image1777184 in 2016. Her work has appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, andPoet Lore. She is the founder and host of the Side Door Poets inAtlanta and the Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains.She has an MA in music history from the University of Michigan and was Vice President of Marketing Communications at a global financial company before leaving to focus on freelance writing and poetry.

What marvelous poems these are, and how complete a collection. Like a circus aerialist who makes us gasp one moment and laugh the next, the poet takes us from herimmigrant father’s Macedonian roots to her own maturity, to the life of a woman who is smart and well-read yet knows her way around a Coney Island hot dog and finds the attentions of a drunk cowboy oddly flattering. There are so many goodpoems here that it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I’ll put my money on “Confessions of an Ugly Nightgown,” in which a dead woman’s shapeless article of intimate apparel says it can stillrouse a sleeping husband and is loveliest as it lies on the floor.

— David Kirby

Available through Ingram, your local bookstore, Amazon.com, and other online retailers

Contact the poet for readings or workshops: [email protected] www.karenpaulholmes.com

No Such Thing as Distance

102 pages, $16.00 ISBN: 978-0-9982159-7-6

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