“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

“If you take your eyes off a page just for a moment, it will take you several moments to refocus, to get your bearings back in line with the language on the page, language that functions like sleight of hand. Gorgeous on its surface, yet equally beautiful to its depths. These poems are exquisite and magically lucid—unclouded, sun-glinted, and luminous. Holly Peppe’s wisdom seems unforced and purely graceful, yet she never once backs down from disclosures or ruminations—the difficulties of love, illness, aging…the difficulties of living. An Absence of Fear is a bighearted, transcendent volume brimming with treasures. I am in awe of this book and would catalogue it as a must-read.”

John L. Stanizzi is the author of fourteen books of poems and a forthcoming memoir

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 precise poetry collection An Absence of Fear confronts the emotions surrounding death, from astonishment to grief…

Sonic resonance directs the book’s lines, which don’t rhyme but use sounds that chime together. Working in free verse aside from a single sonnet entry, the poems make room for the dances of repetition and expectation more often found in formal verse. Their imagery also stands out, layered together and pushed to precarious edges.

An Absence of Fear is a lyrical poetry collection that denies death’s finality even as it mourns great human losses.”

Michele Sharpe, Foreword Reviews

“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

This was a poignant and quietly powerful poetry collection. Some of these really shook me to my core… Highly recommend.

Lauren N

An exploration of love, life, death and what it means to be alive. Holly Peppe delves into the mundane world with a magnifying glass—showing just what it means to be human. There are plenty of themes influenced by her sad news and contemplation of mortality throughout, and ‘Night Letter to Carole’ may or may not have made me tear up a little bit…I really enjoyed this poetry collection!

Miya Fowler

An Absence of Fear is a beautiful, lyrical, yet poignant book of poetry. It gradually tells the story of loss, grief, and terminal illness, scattered throughout beautiful observations of nature, animals, and life.

I loved this book of poetry. I loved the writing, which was lyrical and whimsical from the introduction. I loved the gradual story of what happened to the author, and the slow realisation of what eventually happened. The poems were honest and heartbreaking, loving and pure. It was easy to see the authors’ feelings through the verses.

This is an excellent book for a poetry veteran or novice. The verses are easy to understand, and paint a vivid picture in the readers’ mind.

Jessica Mather

What a beautiful, honest, and heartfelt collection of poetry. It is evident that this author poured her soul and her personal experiences of joy, pain, and grief into each poem, slowly revealing major events of life and loss throughout. The title is perfect for this collection, which demonstrates the author’s resilience to rise up and keep living despite certain circumstances. She has laid her soul bare and her feelings are palpable, especially within the last few poems. I would definitely recommend this collection to everyone! 

Megan Leever

A poet‘s heart is often touched or opened by other poets. The almost magical quality of poetry and its ability to say so much more than the words it shares, the rhythms find purchase and tease open hidden aspects of ones being, reminding you of who you are. You may be surprised by the differences and similarities with that other poet, who here leads you, unsuspecting, into the greatest depths of being. Of where we will all ultimately be led. Start reading with the mind, the reviewer's eye, then quietly being taken into the unexpected heart of the matter, all the more welcome and revealing for how open you have become to where you are being taken. Much like life, and death. Thank you Holly.

Helen O

Really beautiful collection of poetry. Covers a wide variety of topics and emotions. Definitely recommend.

Stella Marchione

An Absence of Fear by Holly Peppe is a vast collection spanning many years of life and writing (or at least this is how it felt). The poems seemingly written later in Peppe’s career were stunning portrayals of living, skill and poetic sensibility. Peppe is undeniably talented, having curated the work of many others in her career. Her work is life-affirming, particularly towards the end where her poems honestly explore an incurable cancer diagnosis—finding meaning and purpose, and ultimately living with open arms, rather than fear.

Kristiana Reed

An Absence of Fear by Holly Peppe is a remarkably beautiful and brave exploration of grief and loss in the face of a terminal illness diagnosis. As someone who is currently living in the darkness of profound grief, these poems resonated to the very core of my being. Ms Peppe's ponderance of her own mortality really stirred in me some underlying fears and emotions of my own, and I can only credit her for working through this to create such a stunningly moving collection of prose. Highly recommended.

Andrea Pole

A thoroughly enjoyable collection. Perhaps enjoyable seems not to be the right word here but there is no word better to sum it up. In the midst of all the death and the sadness of the world, every poem here shows there is a life you live in this place, a life you can love. For every sadness in this collection, there is beauty. This is a collection in which many will find beauty but would be best thumbed by lovers of Dickinson, Mary Oliver, and the Pulitzer novelist Marilyne Robbinson. There are so many wonderful poems here which I shall be thinking of for days to come. I can only say how much I admire the ability to experience something terrible and transform it into something beautiful.

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