Absent Here: Poems

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.

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.