One Subject Press

COMING SOON! April 2026

BOOK RELEASE PARTY April 30th, 2026 Click here for more details

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.

"These poems by Greg Watson capture vibrant moments of a young man and woman in love. He has assembled a vivid and haunting portrait of a woman whose untimely death came, as in one poem in this collection, like an intruder who rifled through the rooms and took nothing discernible except the sense of safety.

'your thin summer skirt

with its pattern of daisies blending into

the long wet grass, the shapes of our bodies,

appearing to be running -- whether toward each other

or away --'

There is a simplicity and beauty in the language. The images in these poems are bright, clear, and moving. The poems are love songs and arguments with fate, evoking the way that time escapes all of us and how we find ourselves irrevocably changed."

--Sheila Packa, former Poet Laureate of Duluth, author of Surface Displacements, and Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range