No Such Thing as Distance - (Terrapin Poetry) by Karen Paul Holmes (Paperback)

About the Book

What marvelous poems these are, and how complete a collection.

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

Karen Paul Holmes is a convincing poet. In No Such Thing as Distance, she mends the body/mind split, the life/death split, the love/betrayal split, and the parent/child split. With beauty and humor, she explores how the past remains the present through music, art, and pop culture, as well as her rich cultural inheritance. A truly empathetic writer, she feels her family's medical procedures and provides us with food--even the recipes! She knows that zumba and the waltz are all part of the same great dance. Her title may signal quantum physics, but it's also how close this poet whispers in her reader's ear.--Denise Duhamel

Karen Paul Holmes lifts up the extraordinary found in the everyday. Here are poems that brim with finely crafted detail, anchored to place while at the same time embracing change and impermanence. "Gulls winter here. / Like all fleeting things, they're special to me," her speaker says of a morning scene at her lake home. In poem after elegant poem, she takes us across generations and countries as she grapples with larger issues, unafraid to explore the fullness of love and loss, the circularity of life. "I lived this day once," she tells us, "and then lived it again."--Nancy Chen Long