Books by Karen Paul Holmes

No Such Thing as Distance (Terrapin Books)

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 her immigrant 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 good poems 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 still rouse a sleeping husband and is loveliest as it lies on the floor.

—David Kirby, Get Up, Please

Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press)

Turning back toward the past, to reckon with and reclaim it, this book seeks to untangle memory. On its surface, Untying the Knot is about severance—about leaving the beloved behind and, likewise, getting left—but it is also a meditation on the sources of love and language. “It’s a comfort / to imagine our rounded bones / becoming round bits of the globe / our spirits rising to orbit among spiral galaxies / joining those who completed the circle before us,” writes Holmes, whose voice pushes readers forward into the unknown with confidence, precision, and empathy.


—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men and Facts About the Moon