“Aby Kaupang’s poetry demonstrates the effects of passion and will as they collide with the brutalities of the world. In writing that is often startling and idiosyncratic, Kaupang surges to the core of the painful paradoxes that beset all of us; this poet doesn’t so much work to resolve contradictions as to force new and courageous energy from their irresolvability. Speaking of loss, Simone Weil states that the presence of an absent or deceased person is “imaginary, but his presence is very real: henceforward it is his way of appearing.” Absence is such a Transparent House is the poetic enactment of this hard won insight. Brave, uncanny, and deeply felt, this book balances the delicacies of attention with the fortitude of continuing exploration.”
—Elizabeth Robinson
“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
“This poetry is of spirit, sound, and naming. Its efforts are worthy, visible; inscribed with lit-up delicacy on the surface tension holding the subject and her subjects. Love, vision, god, death, surrender...surprise! “tragedy too might die/silent rim//silent Eye—””
—Rebecca Wolff
Aby Kaupang is the author of Absence is such a Transparent House (Tebot Bach, 2011) and Scenic Fences I Houses Innumerable (Scantily Clad Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in VOLT, Verse, Denver Quarterly, Best New Poets, The Laurel Review, Parthenon West, Aufgabe, 14 Hills, Interim, Caket rain, lo-ball, PANK and elsewhere.She received her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University, where she is now pursuing her MS in occupational therapy. She lives with the poet Matthew Cooperman and their two children in Fort Collins.
