Poets and Poems: Karen Paul Holmes and "No Such Thing as Distance"

Imagine a man whose country is taken over – and he’s forced to change his name so that it sounds like one belonging to the new political power. Imagine that same man emigrating to America, and one again having his name changed to sound less “foreign” and more pronounceable, at least for the immigration official. Imagine that man accepting the last change in his name and getting on with his life in his new country.

This is part of the story Karen Paul Holmes tells in her new poetry collection No Such Thing as Distance. And the man with the three names is her father.

This sense of change of family pervades the 46 poems of the collection. She writes of other things, but it is her family poems – about relatives, her father, herself, her children – that provide the structure of the poems.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.