Absence Is Such a Transparent House

Poetry. ABSENCE is insatiable, its boundless appetite preys upon the imagination in ways that language can only hint at. Which is perhaps why poetry is a so apt a vessel for responding to absence: its bare branch lines, its chapel whispers, its embodied silences encapsulate loss in ways other forms of art cannot. Aby Kaupang's poems are inhabited by spirits; they literally speak in tongues; they are 'a tender haunting in the glass beneath the waves.' Anyone who has borne grief will recognize its teethmarks here: grief not just as an idea in the mind, but gnawing at the body, the place where it is most keenly felt"—D. A. Powell.