Greg Watson’s The Shape of Your Absence is a poignant exploration of love, loss, and the echoes that linger after departure. With quiet precision and emotional clarity, Watson transforms absence into a living presence—something that shapes, rather than empties, the heart. These poems remind us that what is gone still breathes within what remains.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE SHAPE OF YOUR ABSENCE
"These poems by Greg Watson capture vibrant moments of a young man and woman in love. He has assembled a vivid and haunting portrait of a woman whose untimely death came, as in one poem in this collection, like an intruder who rifled through the rooms and took nothing discernible except the sense of safety.
'your thin summer skirt
with its pattern of daisies blending into
the long wet grass, the shapes of our bodies,
appearing to be running - whether toward each other
or away -'
There is a simplicity and beauty in the language. The images in these poems are bright, clear, and moving. The poems are love songs and arguments with fate, evoking the way that time escapes all of us and how we find ourselves irrevocably changed."
—Sheila Packa, former Poet Laureate of Duluth, author of Surface Displacements, and Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range
“A book of poems that highlights words for changes, transitions, and losses deserves reading—slow reading. Greg Watson addresses absences and presences in multiple ways, via metaphor, memory, and his and her history. Watson's poems embrace ambiguities and losses—‘Words, like memory, are the least reliable of guides.’ And, ‘There is no hurry. / These songs continue singing without us.’ Read this book slowly; allow discernments to emerge.”
—Ted Bowman, author of Ambiguous Parables: Poems and Prose of Loss and Renewal