“A delightful and stirring discovery, these love poems and elegies of Holly Peppe. Her gifts as a lyric poet include a rare balance of epigrammatic wit with deep passion and tenderness. Her crystalline stanzas juxtaposing love and death linger in the memory: there is nothing greater we can ask of our poets than such resonance.”

Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of twenty books of poetry, biography, history, and the upcoming Constellations: Collected Poems (LSU Press, 2025)

“Holly Peppe’s An Absence of Fear is filled with tenderness, undisguised longing for love, and a simultaneous acceptance of, and protest against, death. This book, which we understand as we read will probably be Peppe’s last, wanders the past and the future. Carrying us into death watches and to moments of uncontainable eros, her poems cleave to Malebranche’s beautiful notion that 'attention is the natural prayer of the soul.' The casual tone of the final section is in disarming, evocative tension with a cancer diagnosis it both chronicles and defies. There is no bravura, just the courage of someone seeking to describe both the outer and inner worlds with regard and humor.”

Catherine Barnett is the author of four collections of poetry, including Human Hours and Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space

As part of the marketing for An Absence of Fear, we are pursuing national and genre-focused media along with bookstore representation and speaking opportunities.