Karen Paul Holmes is the author of the full-length collection, Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press, 2014). Her awards include an Elizabeth George Foundation emerging writer grant for poetry. She was chosen for Best Emerging Poets 2015 and has had work published in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, and Poet Lore. She founded and hosts a critique group in Atlanta and Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Following a corporate career in marketing communications, she now works as a freelance writer. She lives in Georgia.

Books by Karen Paul Holmes:

Other poems on the web by Karen Paul Holmes:
"Crossing Off Days"
"What Will You Do, God, When I Die"
Three poems
"The Truth About the Hooters Waitress Kidney Transplant"
"My Barbie Dated George Harrison"
"War Bride"
"Making Zelnik at the Sibling Reunion"
"Older than Barbie"
"Out Like a Lamb"
"A White Room, A Piano"

Karen Paul Holmes's Website.

About No Such Thing As Distance:

"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

"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

"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