Absent Here - (Pitt Poetry) by Bret Shepard (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Book Synopsis

Winner, 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Co-winner, Anchorage Daily News Favorite Books of 2024 Longlist, 2024 Julie Suk Award

Landscape and language drive the poems in Absent Here, which explore loss, community, the changing environment, and whiteness of skin and scenery against the backdrop of the Alaskan North Slope of the author's youth. More than mere background, the land and water become characters in their own right, guiding syntactic forms and flowing reflections. Bret Shepard merges cultural experiences with meditative moments, ensuring that the voices and stories of this community are not lost to time, as so much has been already.

Review Quotes

imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, .. Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska--as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.-- "Rain Taxi"

The suggestion that what is happening in and to the earth has correspondences in the tug and pull, the attraction and withdrawal in somatic experiences and human relationships is one of the book's most arresting features.-- "The Adroit Journal"

Absent Here is rich with community and nature, traversing the hardship and joys within both.-- "Only Poems"

The art he's created from his formative years in Alaska deserves to be recognized here and elsewhere both for its elegant fierceness and its contributions to understanding the place each of us holds in the world.-- "Anchorage Daily News"

Haunted by a childhood on the tundra of Alaska's north slope, Absent Here records what of a place lives on because we do, 'lichen//alive under snow, like thoughts.' A lovingly curated anthology of 'tundra forms' informed by Arctic ecology, this book also documents the catastrophic aftermath of colonial occupation: 'a thief / emptied tundra of its inner life' and brought dispossession, language loss, poverty, addiction, and climate crisis to the Iñupiat. In lines sharpened by passion and restraint, unequivocal about the desires that drive personal and cultural survival, Shepard acknowledges catastrophe and offers tribute to continuance. After reading these fierce and phenomenal poems, it's impossible to deny that the Arctic 'fuels / what the rest of us feel.'--Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man

In this collection of lonesome and desolate poems, the poet states, 'I'm missing a language for what is lost.' Perhaps everyday language is gone--absent here--yet in these lines and fragments polished until shining is a more durable inner wisdom. Here are questions that must be faced, but there are no answers. No matter. Most of the questions we need to be answered are unanswerable anyway. And so the poet offers up what he's made out of his unanswerable questions, and it is 'more than truth more than language'--poetry. A remarkable collection in which the poet shares with us questions for a lifetime. Read it and consider your own.--Roxane Beth Johnson, author of Jubilee and Black Crow Dress

Visual, sensual, and clear, this collection maps a distinctly Alaskan space. The relationships, realities, land, sky, creatures, waters--ice--of the Arctic breathe in these poems like characters. There's a tricky math at work: each poem adds to or subtracts from what a lone human can know. This is life as some gorgeous zero-sum game. These poems, even if defined by howling absence, encourage us to mark the present and live, simply live, in it.--Heidi Erdrich, Donald Hall Prize for Poetry judge

About the Author

Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska. He is the author of Place Where Presence Was, winner of the Moon City Press Book Award, as well as two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which won the Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review.