K.P. Anderson
Poet
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Keen observation and emotional depth, enticingly combined.”
“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.”
Cover Image Sources:
Thistle from plate 60, "A Scottish Thistle" in Thorburn, Archibald, A Naturalist's Sketch Book. London: Longmans, Green and co., 1919. Digitized and presented at the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL).
Bee from The Story of a Picture. New York: J. Ottmann Lithographing, 1893.
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
Follow at:
Instagram: k.p._anderson
Copyright 2014-2024, K.P. Anderson