Some caribou take place with late hunger. If death is the mindout of season, you hunt the sound of what it wasin the melt-filled space outside. You hear it beneath the lowesttempo of need. You find it in your nature. Loston the trails of others, lost in reflectionmost nights—memories like the melt that was once ice. What islost outside moves without you. The sound is one track playinghours of your inside voice.
Evening Traffic
Bret Shepard
Feature Date
- February 12, 2025
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“Evening Traffic” from Absent Here by Bret Shepard, © 2024. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Bret Shepard is from Alaska. His collection of poems Absent Here was awarded AWP’s 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. And another full length, Place Where Presence Was, won the Moon City Poetry Prize. He is author of two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which received the Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review.
Landscape and language drive the poems in Absent Here, which explore loss, community, the changing environment, and whiteness of skin and scenery against the backdrop of the Alaskan North Slope of the author’s youth. More than mere background, the land and water become characters in their own right, guiding syntactic forms and flowing reflections. Bret Shepard merges cultural experiences with meditative moments, ensuring that the voices and stories of this community are not lost to time, as so much has been already.
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