Absent Here
Poems
Published on 8. October 2024
81 pages
978-0-8229-9166-3 (ISBN)
Description
Winner, 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry | Named an Anchorage Daily News Favorite Book 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.
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.
More details
Person
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.
Content
- Cover
- CONTENTS
- Bedtime Story with Eagle and Sun
- 1.
- Here but Elsewhere
- Radiation Hotel
- Heat Genesis
- On Ice
- Snow Machines
- Debt
- Elegy with a Middle Seat
- Three Versions
- Arctic Negative
- Arctic Current
- ANWR
- Morning Traffic
- Here but Elsewhere
- Territories
- 2.
- Physical Retail
- Poem with Ice and Breakup
- Desire Swells
- Here but Elsewhere
- A Wave
- Rhetorical Analysis
- Play at Being People
- The Basement
- Lines toward Browerville, AK
- Coast
- Zen and the Organic
- Evening Traffic
- Set against White Background
- Here but Elsewhere: Two Versions
- 3.
- Last Sunset
- Outside (of Life)
- Still Storm
- Here but Elsewhere
- What Warmed
- Landscape with Removal
- Cemetery
- Anthophobia
- Tundra Forms
- Winter Breaks
- Summer Camp
- Dancing in Atqasuk, AK
- Here but Elsewhere
- The Trouble
- Acknowledgments
