Absent Here

The art he’s created from his formative years in Alaska deserves to be recognized here and elsewhere both for its elegant fierceness and its contributions to understanding the place each of us holds in the world.

Visual, sensual, and clear, this collection maps a distinctly Alaskan space. The relationships, realities, land, sky, creatures, waters—ice—of the Arctic breathe in these poems like characters. There’s a tricky math at work: each poem adds to or subtracts from what a lone human can know. This is life as some gorgeous zero-sum game. These poems, even if defined by howling absence, encourage us to mark the present and live, simply live, in it.

In this collection of lonesome and desolate poems, the poet states, ‘I’m missing a language for what is lost.’ Perhaps everyday language is gone—absent here—yet in these lines and fragments polished until shining is a more durable inner wisdom. Here are questions that must be faced, but there are no answers. No matter. Most of the questions we need to be answered are unanswerable anyway. And so the poet offers up what he’s made out of his unanswerable questions, and it is ‘more than truth more than language’—poetry. A remarkable collection in which the poet shares with us questions for a lifetime. Read it and consider your own.

Haunted by a childhood on the tundra of Alaska’s north slope, Absent Here records what of a place lives on because we do, ‘lichen//alive under snow, like thoughts.’ A lovingly curated anthology of ‘tundra forms’ informed by Arctic ecology, this book also documents the catastrophic aftermath of colonial occupation: ‘a thief / emptied tundra of its inner life’ and brought dispossession, language loss, poverty, addiction, and climate crisis to the Iñupiat. In lines sharpened by passion and restraint, unequivocal about the desires that drive personal and cultural survival, Shepard acknowledges catastrophe and offers tribute to continuance. After reading these fierce and phenomenal poems, it’s impossible to deny that the Arctic ‘fuels / what the rest of us feel.’