Absent Here: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series) - Softcover

Shepard, Bret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822967286 ISBN 13: 9780822967286

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Absent Here: Poems by Bret Shepard

HEAT GENESIS

The purged caribou heart. The first arctic
meal prepared raw before fire. Before fires

purpled meat, meat was ulued off to serve
an open mouth. The first heart’s crevasses

stretched like caribou cut raw. Proto-heart
raw in search of fire, red windburn revealed

the body. That blood wanting of new heat
lived in the body raw. Open arctic, the first

blood transfusion was what caribou purged
fed into veins as freeze threatened the heart.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822967286
• ISBN 13: 9780822967286
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80