Editor’s note: A review of “Receipt” was also published in the May 10 issue of The Washington Post.
Karen Leona Anderson, associate professor of English, will have her collection of poetry, “Receipt,” featured on Food52’s “Weekend Reads.” Food52, run by the editors of the New York Times, is a clearinghouse for food media that bring cooks together from all over to exchange recipes and ideas and to support each other in the kitchen.
Receipt was published in April 2016 by Milkweed Editions. In this collection, Anderson transforms apparently prosaic documents, recipes and receipts, into expressions of human identity. Milkweed describes the collection as “the lovechild of Anne Sexton and Adam Smith, illuminating the ways in which our lives are both constrained by pieces of paper, and able to slip through the crevices of cultural detritus down to the rich current of animal feeling beneath.”
Anderson joined the St. Mary’s College faculty in 2008. She is the author of the poetry collection “Punish Honey” (Carolina Wren Press, 2009). She received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an M.A. from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where she wrote a dissertation on poetry and science. Her work has appeared in ecopoetics, New American Writing, Fence, Volt, and The Best American Poetry 2012.