Winner of the 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
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 answered are unanswerable anyway. And so the poet offers up what he’s made out of his unanswerable, 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
IVisual, 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 or subtracts from what a lone human can know. This is life as some gorgeous zero-sum game. These poems encourage us, even if defined by howling absence, to mark the present and live, simply live, in it.
- Heid E. Erdrich, Donald Hall Prize Final Judge
Winner of the 2019 Moon City Press Poetry Award
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About Place Where Presence Was:
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To achieve a quiet mind you must first / hear it speak.” With a sharply elegant lyricism, Bret Shepard’s Place Where Presence Was reanimates our most persistent philosophical quandaries of time, space, and being: How can “I” be “I” and not “you”? These poems interrogate memories and tread familiar landscapes charged with the undertow of elegiac human sorrow. “There was a We in weather,” Shepard writes, reminding us that some forces cancel each other out and leave us singular—newly creatured and strange.
—Emily Rosko, author of Weather Inventions
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Near the closing of Bret Shepard’s Place Where Presence Was, a speaker observes that “[t]o add ex- to anything is violent.” In this unnerving, riveting collection, readers enter a domestic space in which two people play out the end of love, moving back and forth between the twin impulses to strike and to hold. This is a book of compasses and maps, of spare, restrained poems that circle around loss and of being lost. Whether we walk through the modern rupture of the city or stand at the water’s edge, these poems suggest that intimacy is unsustainable, that desire turns us monstrous, and that absence of the beloved is more palpable than any breathing body we might touch.
–Jehanne Dubrow, author of Dots and Dashes
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A beautiful reflection on the world around as well as the world within, Place Where Presence Was draws out the splendor of spaces that often go unnoticed or unspoken. These are the hidden backyard places, the abandoned cars and memories and bodies that are around us every day. Shepard employs form and language that inspires real thought about environments, communities, and selves. This wonderfully intelligent collection of poems offers new ways of seeing the world at a time when we need such perspective more than ever.
—Sarah Nolan, author of Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry
The Territorial
Winner of the 2020 Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review/GreenTower Press
Negative Compass
Winner of the 2018 Wells College Chapbook Prize