Place Where Presence Was: Poems

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.