Name: Place Where Presence Was: Poems
ISBN: 9780913785591

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Place Where Presence Was: Poems

Bret Shepard

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Winner of the 2019 Moon City Poetry Award

"Contour lines // down your side of the bed ..." Such lines mark the Place Where Presence Was, Bret Shepard's debut full-length collection and winner of the Moon City Poetry Award.

Here, Shepard probes intimacy and its absence through topographical imagery, with endlessly inventive ways of approaching his theme. In one poem, X marks the spot (on a calendar); in another, the title poem, the invisible path of his lover through his home are viewed as marks of elevation. For Shepard, the map is a tool to make sense of the world and our relationship to it, and the poems themselves add another dimension from which to view the spaces between us.

These are poems of longing, with the emphasis on "long," and a recognition of all the ways desire stretches distance ever farther --and of "the necessary ways we quiet / into nothing at all."

Book Details

Publisher: Moon City Press
Publish Date: Apr 1st, 2021
Pages: 80
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.50in - 0.26lb
EAN: 9780913785591
Categories: • American - General

About the Author

From Alaska, Bret Shepard has lived throughout the Pacific and Arctic coasts. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Cabrini University. His books include Negative Compass, winner of the Wells College Chapbook Prize, and The Territorial, winner of the 2020 Midwest Chapbook Award from GreenTower Press and the Laurel Review.

More books by Bret Shepard

Book Cover for: Absent Here: Poems, Bret Shepard

What people are saying

Moon City Press

@MoonCityPress

4 years

Literary press housed in the English Department at Missouri State University. Sponsors the Moon City Poetry Award and the Moon City Short Fiction Award.

Moon City Press is celebrating the release of Bret Shepard's debut full-length collection, Place Where Presence Was, by offering a discount! Take 33% off the price today and grab your copy for just $9.95. Be sure to use code SHEP21 at checkout: https://t.co/rW6MAvXlDK

Moon City Review is housed in the English Department of Missouri State University and publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and graphic narrative.

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Praise for this book

"Near the closing of Bret Shepard's Place Where Presence Was, a speaker observes that '[t]o add ex- to anything is violent.' In this unnerving, riveting collection, readers enter a domestic space in which two people play out the end of love, moving back and forth between the twin impulses to strike and to hold. This is a book of compasses and maps, of spare, restrained poems that circle around loss and of being lost. Whether we walk through the modern rupture of the city or stand at the water's edge, these poems suggest that intimacy is unsustainable, that desire turns us monstrous, and that absence of the beloved is more palpable than any breathing body we might touch."
--Jehanne Dubrow, author of Wild Kingdom and Simple Machines: Sonnets

"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

"'Though I've no exact way to say where I am, which is to say know who I am, ' Bret Shepard writes, 'these words are the only map.' In Place Where Presence Was, his attempt 'to say where' and 'to know who' we are, language simultaneously becomes the means of mapping the world and the landscape itself as he adopts the dual role of cartographer and world-builder. His collection is like a globe, both representation and reality, in which each poem is a distinct region encompassed by its opening and closing words. At the same time, the collection's linguistic terrain--concrete yet paradoxical, spare yet stratified--is present in every poem, drawing its own fluid borders with 'lines the shape of memory.' Shepard stands at the frontier where 'words / form our geology, ' where the body is both position and possibility. Follow him wherever he leads."
--Jose Reyes, author of Present Values

"What happens when you combine the taut precision of mathematical equations with the sumptuousness of nude paintings? In Place Where Presence Was, we see poetry whittled down to its barest core, its round bloody bones, flavored with subtle humor as they pursue the questions that define our humanity in the first place."
--Michael Meyerhofer, author of Ragged Eden

What people are saying

Moon City Press

@MoonCityPress

4 years

Literary press housed in the English Department at Missouri State University. Sponsors the Moon City Poetry Award and the Moon City Short Fiction Award.

Moon City Review is housed in the English Department of Missouri State University and publishes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and graphic narrative.

twitter.com