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. “The Shape of Your Absence, is a series of grief and remembrance poems for the woman I lived with for over a decade in my youth. She taught me a lot, and I want to honor her,” says Greg. In this luminous and haunting collection, Greg Watson measures the invisible contours of longing. Across delicate, finely-wrought poems, absence emerges not as emptiness but as a presence—an echo, a wound, a memory that shapes everything around it. Artist bios: Greg Watson is an award-winning author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently ‘The Shape of Your Absence’ released in Spring 2026. He is also co-editor with Richard Broderick of The Road by Heart: Poems of Fatherhood, published by Nodin Press. Greg is a native of Saint Paul, MN and still resides there with his daughter. Renee Vaughan is a Minnesota-based artist who brings Sweden’s folk traditions to life through music, dance, painting, and storytelling Christy Merry is a native Minnesotan, an award-winning poet, and a singer-songwriter. As an adult, she lived, wrote and performed in Chicago, LA and NYC before returning to her home state, where she now lives with her husband and two black cats. Chances are, she wants to be your friend. Love and loss are frequent themes in her writing, as they are in life.
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