Absence Like Sun

Absence Like Sun illuminates an axiomatic paradox subverting the foremost symbol of the Platonic ideal and the writer’s working relationship with Louisiana regionalism. This book of lyric poetry also presents a creative, mythic worldview, which orbits the title imagery’s subverted symbolism, where the sun becomes the warming image of absence. Conceptually, these poems function like heliophysics—alternating between solar flares and an axis poem in concurrent verse utilizing the left and right side of the page. Some of the predominant recurring themes of the manuscript are haunting homelessness, filiation/affiliation, post-Katrina New Orleans, Christian myth, and the paradoxical nature of the universe.

Praise for Vincent A. Cellucci and Absence Like Sun

Rich and strange as New Orleans itself—the cityscape that haunts this “galaxy / nursing extinction”—Vincent A. Cellucci’s new collection is a constantly renewed invitation live with the kind of intensity that will “replenish your death.” Moving from “eternity to eternity,” the poems in Absence Like Sun wander the romantic psyche like a saxophone solo: loose and exploratory, fierce and free, going out “into the stars / gathering loss,” and making a kind of home there we could never expect.
—Laura Mullen, author of Complicated Grief

The presence of Absence Like Sun, like the presence of son in sun, is a haunting mystery of loss, pun and assertion. Mordant, biting, the poems are drawn to what’s discarded or to what is bereft. The poet rests his eye as Whitman would.
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of Yonder

Vincent A. Cellucci is the author of An Easy Place / To Die (CityLit Press, 2011) and editor of Fuck Poems: An Exceptional Anthology (Lavender Ink, 2012). come back river (Finishing Line Press, 2014) is a bilingual Bengali-English translation chapbook with the poet and artist Debangana Banerjee. a ship on the line (Unlikely Books, 2014), a battleship- collaboration with poet Christopher Shipman, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. His Diamonds in Dystopia, an interactive poetry experience, was anthologized in Best American Experimental Writing 2018. He teaches communication and digital media in the College of Art & Design at Louisiana State University.