Absence is the debut collection by Ali Lewis
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Absence, the third title in CHEERIO’s acclaimed poetry series, is a book about nothing. Or nothings: losses, vacua, gaps.
From the desolation at the heat-death of the universe to the impassable distance between two people talking, and from the trust exercise of walking in darkness to experiments on the vacuum, Absence searches for what’s missing and what we never had.
Starting with the problem of how to represent what isn’t there, and ending with the end of love, Absence takes in the ache for a vanished god, the permanently delayed doomsday of millenarian cults, and the overflowing life inside our seemingly empty buckets and stomachs.
Ali Lewis’s poems mirror, undermine, reframe and rephrase each other in a voice that feels as precise and scientific as is it playful and warm.
Absence is both intricate and ambitious, comic and tragic. It is a book of restless curiosity and revelation.
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Praise for Absence
“Absence high-wire-walks the line between nostalgia and embodied memory. “Since I’ve been reckoning with grief” hums one of Lewis’ refrains that faces up to the primordial concerns of death, faith, love and loss: “I wish we could look faster than the world could paint.” What unifies this quasi-apophatic collection is Lewis’ crisp poetic voice that waxes comic, tragic, impassioned, vacant, but always crystalline: “And fear? That’s just the body’s / honest accounting of all we already have.” Absence is a nuanced and ambitious debut.”
“Now that my journalistic integrity is in tatters, I might as well mention my favourite debut of the year, Absence, by my friend Ali Lewis, whose quietly philosophical poems of art, faith and heartbreak – with the light touch of Michael Donaghy – are the kind I wish I could write, and leave me seething with jealousy.”
“‘Deft, ingenious, funny and metaphysically gymnastic. What an absolute gift it is.’
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“‘I love this. Ali Lewis’s poems have an unparaphrasable quality, as if they’re not read but inhaled, like a clear vapour which leaves you giddy, tranquil and troubled all at once. Read it, you’ll see what I mean.’”
“‘In these searching, inventive, quick-witted poems, vulnerability is revealed then obscured and the ordinary and everyday becomes transformed.’”