An Absence of Fear is a brave book by a poet who spent a lifetime writing poems documenting the sustaining power of nature, the importance of family, the thrill of love, the heartbreak of loss, and, finally, the reality of an incurable cancer diagnosis. The inherent power of this collection is Holly Peppe’s clarity about living without fear. “ 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 “ To experience Holly Peppe’s poetic vision is a profound gift. Her singular sensitivity, compassion, and largesse of spirit make for a collection that is as elegant and unassuming as the bird that occupies her first childhood poem: the swan. There are phrases here—'pale mornings breaking lonely'—that I will return to forever, with gratitude for Peppe’s devotion to poetry, to beauty, to life.” —Lindsay Whalen is a Leon Levy Center for Biography fellow and author of the forthcoming biography of Mary Oliver “Writer and editor Holly Peppe has generously given us nearly a hundred heartfelt poems about love and death told with searing honesty and fierce courage as well as penetrating intelligence. Her joy in the beauty of the light or the sky or her lake is poignant as she reminds us that our perceptions, and especially hers, are impermanent and passing.” —Laurie Lisle is a biographer and a memoirist whose latest book is Word for Word: A Writer’s Life “ Holly Peppe is an artist with words. She knows how to work the beauty and power of language. This book is not just a long overdue gift to herself but a gift to everyone who loves poetry written with heart and mind and craft. It offers poems like moonlight showing the way.” —Jonathan Cohen is a poet, translator, scholar, author of Muna Lee: A Pan-American Life , and translator of Pedro Mir’s Poems of Good Love...and Sometimes Fantasy “In the elegant lines of these poems, Holly Peppe finds unillusioned insights in visual images: ‘flowering trees and jasmine and sweet women and pearls’ suggest the ‘myths you believed until now.’ The birds seen ‘From My First Avenue Window’ remind the poet that she is ‘suspended between / good health / and death.’ A lifetime of observation, thought, and craft has inspired this volume of honest, beautiful poems. ” —Lucy McDiarmid is a scholar and writer. Her most recent monograph is At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916 ; her book on contemporary Irish poetry is forthcoming in 2025 “ This extraordinary collection of poems manages to reveal both the poet’s absence of fear and an abundance of life. Peppe’s clarity, courage, humor, wisdom, and love for nature resound through her lines, opening the way to her active mind and loving heart.” —Mimi White is the author of four collections of poems including The Last Island , winner of the Jane Kenyan Award for Outstanding Poetry, and The Arc Remains “Where do we find the confidence to live, to find meaning, to communicate, in the face of the excruciating truth of absence, of nothingness? All of us, most of the time, must wall off anxiety by turning to our numbing routines, or to religion or old myths to help us come to terms with what we cannot know. The more courageous of us, by delving into the grace of their experiences through poetic language, are able to glide upon the surface of oblivion and sing the song of being and non-being for all of us, as Holly Peppe does, in this swan song of a life lived in poetry.” —Thomas E. Hill , Vassar College Art Librarian, Professor of English, and host of the Library Café, is the author of a study of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and a commemorative edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, Take Up the Song “If you take your eyes off a page just for a mome