Requiem for the Beekeeper, by Katherine Leonard

Poetry, chapbook, 52 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Requiem for the Beekeeper is a three-part harmony of the interdependence of nature, human nature and relationship from the universal to the intimately personal. The journey of joy and enslavement and nurturance and deceit is filled with music that plays through this work.

Love arising is no simpler than spring growth with challenges of weather and careening circumstance that shape lives. The openings and closings of the work travel through a panoramic scope to land softly on the personal entwining of family with humor with regret and with the deep rootedness of lives shared within the world that influences and enfolds them.

Katherine Leonard grew up in the US and Italy. She lived in Massachusetts at the time of John F Kennedy's assassination and experienced segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as a high school student in rural Texas. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her writing has been deeply influenced by time spent in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado for space and heat and Vermont and Maine for ice and clarity and by living in Washington, DC for lies and redemption. She is married to the woman with fire in her guitar. Her work has been published in Sonora Review, Querencia Press Anthologies, Hole in the Head Review, Speckled Trout Review, FERAL, Allium and Stone Canoe.

"Requiem for the Beekeeper considers the individual’s relationship to the natural world juxtaposing notions of ownership with that of stewardship, while maintaining a poetic grace in language and form that invites the reader into its deferential meditative imagery. Leonard’s evocative conversations with historical figures, both real and imagined, challenge the reader’s expectations of what is personal and yet becomes political, even so understanding that ultimately, what matters most is love."

—Antoinette Brim-Bell Connecticut State Poet Laureate. Author. Educator. Editor. Artist. http://www.antoinettebrim.com

"Just as Theodore Roethke studied 'the lives on a leaf: the little. Sleepers' in Requiem for the Beekeeper Katherine Leonard applies her poet's lens to the natural world, 'the wild rice making moon,' as closely as to our human world of shared histories and violences, our labors, loves, losses, and that 'time [our] mother caught [us] with a girl behind the shed.' These are poems of an observed life, with 'the delicacy / of cucumber sandwiches' and a wounded, open heart inviting us all in. Buy this book and read it aloud to someone you love, ideally when the wind's blowing and your hair is 'swarming like bees.'"

Christopher Citro, author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun; http://christophercitro.com/

"Requiem for the Beekeeper delivers the reader to a tender world, keen observations, and righteous indignation as witness to the darker nature of humans. Throughout these poems, there is a gentle heart that knows love and compassion as a living art. A skilled listener, Katherine Leonard's own words paint it best: Willow branch of tender perception/listening/in the desolate byways…Waiting for moonrise…."

Georgia A. Popoff, author of Living with Haints; https://georgiapopoff.com/