This week’s other featured books, “Kissing the World Goodbye,” by Jennifer Clark, “Sweet Malida,” by Zilka Joseph and “Raven’s Grave,” by Charlotte Stuart, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
—————————————–
THE BOOK: Place Where Presence Was
THE AUTHOR: Bret Shepard.
THE EDITOR: Karen Craigo and Michael Czyzniejewski
THE PUBLISHER: Moon City Press.
SUMMARY: Place Where Presence Was is a collection of poems that engage with the intersections of domesticity and ecology. These poems are in conversation with a personal, contemporary world that moves faster than we often sense happening. As such, these poems seek to respond by emphasizing the sensorial experience through language and lyric compression. A primary narrative thread through many of the poems is between the speaker of the poems (“I”) to a specific lover (“you”). There are some breakup poems and some reconciliation poems and some nature poems. The domestic relationships are set against the natural landscapes that often reveal the subjectivity of living.
THE BACK STORY: I started writing most of these individual poems during my PhD. Eventually I had enough for a manuscript. In total, it took around ten years of writing, compiling, and shaping the order of poems. The last couple of years prior to publication consisted of me sending the manuscript to more competitions, while also working on newer poems for what I hoped would be my next book. The newer poems felt like they were part of something else. Having the manuscript accepted for publication was needed for me to fully move into a new project.
WHY THIS TITLE?: It is the title of one of the poems, but I hope it creates threads for people, places, and time between poems. The title owes much to Emily Dickinson.
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The poems are contained pieces while also offering connections to each other. You can pick it up to read a short poem and then put it away. Or you can read a few in different places and feel some pull between them.
These poems offer experiences of human relationships and concerns for the natural world. Some of what we share as humans is in these poems.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“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
“We are all born into this world lost, and we search for our place within it by fashioning a compass out of our experiences. Bret Shepard’s debut collection, Place Where Presence Was is a smart, intellectual interrogation of the ontological arguments that exist underneath the surface of our daily lives. Shepard deconstructs loss and desire by meditating on the fallibility of memory, the fluidity of time, and the destruction of the physical landscapes that we inhabit and share. With a sparse aesthetic, classical allusions, and sharp intelligence, Shepard’s poems explain how “myth enters the body,” and in the face of pain and loss “life still exists in doses of moments.” This book is a shining example of the mind’s ability to triumph.” —John McCarthy, author of Scared Violent like Horses
AUTHOR PROFILE: I am from Alaska. I was lucky enough to grow up in places like Atqasuk, Browerville, and Anchorage. Growing up in Alaska, like some of my friends who thought about going to college, leaving the state seemed inevitable. I eventually did leave for school. I completed my PhD in English at the University of Nebraska and my MFA in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College (CA).
I am the author of the forthcoming collection Absent Here, which was awarded the 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. And another full length, Place Where Presence Was, winner of the Moon City Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which received the Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review. I currently live outside of Philadelphia and teach at Goldey-Beacom College.
What spare time I have I spend playing video games with my wife and kids, walking our dog, and watching Arsenal football or Sixers basketball.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I hope the poems in this book give language to experiences and for brief moments of reading even become experiences. Getting absorbed by syntax or form or image is one human activity that deepen how we live. If not the poems in my book, then I hope for that elsewhere.
Because the poems in Place Where Presence Was are poems about love and loss, of both places and people, I hope there is something in them (some questions or meditations) that feel necessary for someone else.
SAMPLE:
LIVING AS MAGNETS
The mood of the oven—
plastic is more than plastic
when it burns. Did we design this
room to smell of plastic? The open
floor-plan circles us into each other.
And who cares.
And who suffocates. Fields suffocate
as snowfall pulls our bodies outside.
It shouldn’t be shameful to breathe.
Wheat stubble crunches as feet
sink into snow. The ground pulls us.
For as long as I can remember,
the ground has been pulling us,
as if iron laced our bones, promising
last breaths, a few
last clear breaths.
PLACE WHERE PRESENCE WAS
At breakfast I can’t eat, so I draw
a topographical map of where
your body was. I look for relief
when you’re not here. Contour lines
down your side of the bed, then up
the refrigerator door, its elevation
suggesting your torso, and inside it
the eggs you’d break on yourself.
Then the dip
in the couch where your body sat
drinking coffee. Dark concentrations
where lines bunch together. Dark
stains on the cushion, spilt thoughts.
COMPASSED
Once, the entire world went dark
when the sun set. No one found
other bodies in the night. Everyone
absented touch in winter. This made
December the first metaphor
for death. But not everyone died.
They learned to start fires at night.
Then the moon became the second
metaphor for death, when under it
everyone learned to make love.
NEGATIVE COMPASS
Direction is silence beyond the gated forest
edging the field. We gate tonight. Then stop.
Or silence the meadow.
Then stop talking. Or unrest our legs and set ourselves
a path along the creek-bed.
Then digest the matter of silence and the voles.
Pace slows the slow of speech, as in words
form our geology.
Then natural matter is as constructed as the rest.
Or we are mountains
peeking above clouds and we smell the fragrance
of biology. Then insect chords make us dance.
Or we erupt.
Then night erupts. Then silence is direction.
WHERE TO BUY IT: University of Arkansas Press (https://www.uapress.com/product/place-where-presence-was/) and Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Place-Where-Presence-Was-Poems/dp/0913785598)
PRICE: $14.95
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: bretshepard.com / Instagram: @bret_w_shepard
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 