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

"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

"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

"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-perhap
Terri Kirby Erickson, author of A Sun Inside My Chest"