K.P. Anderson
Poet


Photo of K.P. Anderson by Shar Steed
Photo by Shar Steed

K.P. Anderson is an award-winning poet who lives and writes in Washington, DC. Her chapbook Mellifluous, which arose from her fascination with bees and her years keeping a Warré hive, is a winner of the Uncollected Press Full Length Book or Chapbook of Poetry Contest and was featured by American Bee Journal as a Spring Read. Her poem “Correspondence" is included as a finalist in Public Poetry's Pandemic Poems anthology, and her chapbook Upsurgent was chosen as a finalist in Cordella Press's Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strong Verse, District Lines, Hope and Heart Unite for ME/CFS Poetry and Art Slam, Forbidden Peak Press, The Raw Art Review, District Lit, and elsewhere.


Praise for Mellifluous:

“K.P. Anderson’s Mellifluous shapes and experiments with sound, whereby each taut poem grows personal, then universal. Nature (especially the bee) performs in this chapbook; a human compass—existential and spiritual—focus the rituals of being. The title informs the reader not how to feel or say, but how to be, and see into an internal terrain—through a music that queries and cajoles.”

Yusef Komunyakaa, Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

“In her gorgeous new chapbook, Mellifluous, K.P. Anderson reveals herself to be a honey-tongued poet, inviting us into a realm where the natural world meets human imagination. The poems seem to fly, drinking in language the way bees float and labor to extract sweet nectar. This spare but powerful work of poetry transported me, momentarily, beyond the limits of time and space. I did not expect to be moved so fully by these poems; they blend hope with lamentation in order to encode the mysterious impulse of physical and spiritual creativity. Anderson invites us to feel this impulse fully, saying 'Fly with me to sip/The laden flowers,' and her invitation is impossible to resist.”

Julia Caroline Knowlton, Poet and Professor, 2018 Georgia Author of the Year

“K.P. Anderson's keen, unstinting eye follows nature's mysteries down to their smallest grain and succeeds in making the ordinary something richly strange.”

Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln

“Keen observation and emotional depth, enticingly combined.”

Clarke Bustard, music critic and cultural writer,
recipient of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music writing

“What I knew of bees, before reading K.P. Anderson’s fine collection, Mellifluous, was the pain of their stingers in the soles of my bare feet, and that bees are necessary. Therefore, I am most grateful to this author for taking her readers deep into the hive, allowing us to hear the bees’ mellifluous, most intimate songs. From her first poem, ‘Mating Flight,’ to the last, ‘Coda,’ I was entirely immersed in the complex, interconnected, and private world of bees in a way I never imagined possible, by a poet who brings the hive to life so completely, one might believe she is their frequent guest. Anderson’s knowledge of her subject matter is impressive, but what really wowed me is her ability to describe, with such tender feeling, the secret lives of creatures so vital to our survival, we all ought to know more about them—perhaps even fall a little in love with them. Thanks to K.P. Anderson and lines like, ‘A bee would rise/Enlisting the sun as her lantern,’ I did.”

Terri Kirby Erickson, author of A Sun Inside My Chest



Book cover of Mellifluous by K.P. Anderson featuring an image of a bee approaching a thistle in twilight
Click for cover image sources


Mellifluous, winner of The Raw Art Review's UnCollected Press Full Length Book or Chapbook of Poetry Contest, is available at:



Contact the poet at kpandersonpoetry@gmail.com

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Instagram: k.p._anderson

Copyright 2014-2024, K.P. Anderson