Absentia (Penguin Poets)

New from the author of Nervous Systems, winner of the National Poetry Series.

William Stobb has won acclaim for wide-ranging poetry that features tender realism, jazzy dissonance, luminous descriptions, and, in the words of Donald Revell, a "strange and elegantly accomplished serenity of tensions attenuated to their uttermost." The poems in his second collection, Absentia, see the big picture-the sweep of history, the ongoing evolution of consciousness, evidence of geological time in the landscape. Humbled by scales beyond comprehension, Stobb is nonetheless seduced and stricken by the present in its many manifestations. Whether dealing with family, friends, or nature, the poems in Absentia, with their rich emotional palette and vivid, precise language, respond and transform, calling us to attend to the wide skies above and inside us.

William Stobb's debut collection, Nervous Systems, was a 2006 National Poetry Series winner. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and MiPOesias. He lives in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.