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ABSENCE DESCENDING, poetry by Bill Verble
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 56 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-27-7
How do I stop your absence / from following me to every room? In this haunting debut, Absence Descending, Bill Verble explores inheritance, memory, and the ways absence lingers like a shadow, a presence that refuses to let go. Displacement runs the length of this collection like a caught thread. Readers follow the speaker through abandoned spaces and memories, places once alive and now unrecognizable. From the weight of inheritance to meditations on mortality that stretch back thousands of years, this collection insists that absence is not empty. The poems ask, Is this what ghosts feel? suggesting that haunting is not only what the dead do to us, but what we do to ourselves when we return to places that no longer hold us. Elegiac and thought provoking, Absence Descending is for anyone who has felt haunted by memory yet consoled by its persistence. These poems remind us that while time moves forward, what is remembered continues to live, reshaping us in ways we cannot forget.
Praise for Bill Verble & Absence Descending
Absence Descending, Bill Verble's outstanding debut poetry collection, is a book about changes – wanted and unwanted, expected and unexpected. Changes in attitudes, bodies, relationships, lives outlived. How does forever disappear? asks the speaker in his love-infused elegies for important people in his life. We are welcomed as trusted friends as we become privy to little secrets in the speaker’s pocket while he poses difficult questions and faces the facts of mortality – his own, or everyone else’s. Even though the larger theme in Absence Descending is death, the poetry is very much alive and every reader will be able to connect with these beautifully crafted, relatable poems.
—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House
Absence Descending is a meditation on midlife, a collection that is both holy and wholly human. In it, Bill Verble tenderly and masterfully explores the quiet bargainings we make as we navigate what it means to be in the middle – as we simultaneously face the mortality of loved ones, the ever-changing dynamic of growing children, and our own reckoning with impermanence. In these poems, Verble has captured ether, transforming universal experiences and emotions into a balm for others who are in the in-between, as he reminds us “Life surrenders in winter / making way for life.” I read Absence Descending with both an ache of recognition and a sigh of relief as I realized I’m not alone in deciding what to hold on to and what to discard, in wondering what it would feel like to be a ghost drifting through past lives, in fearing “my mother’s paradise / does not include / being my mother.” Absence Descending is one I will return to often as I seek to see spirit in the everyday and remember that none of us are alone in our human experience.
—Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy
About the Author
Bill Verble is a poet from Lexington, Kentucky, where he works as a human resources director. His work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Okay Donkey, Spare Parts Literary, and Yearling. He was honored to receive a Pushcart nomination in 2023. Bill has always been inspired to write by his father, who was a poet-in-residence for a school system many years ago. He currently serves as the treasurer for the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Most important to Bill is sharing his days with his dear wife Shannon, his children Kate and Liam, and two large, unruly cats.
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 56 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-27-7
How do I stop your absence / from following me to every room? In this haunting debut, Absence Descending, Bill Verble explores inheritance, memory, and the ways absence lingers like a shadow, a presence that refuses to let go. Displacement runs the length of this collection like a caught thread. Readers follow the speaker through abandoned spaces and memories, places once alive and now unrecognizable. From the weight of inheritance to meditations on mortality that stretch back thousands of years, this collection insists that absence is not empty. The poems ask, Is this what ghosts feel? suggesting that haunting is not only what the dead do to us, but what we do to ourselves when we return to places that no longer hold us. Elegiac and thought provoking, Absence Descending is for anyone who has felt haunted by memory yet consoled by its persistence. These poems remind us that while time moves forward, what is remembered continues to live, reshaping us in ways we cannot forget.
Praise for Bill Verble & Absence Descending
Absence Descending, Bill Verble's outstanding debut poetry collection, is a book about changes – wanted and unwanted, expected and unexpected. Changes in attitudes, bodies, relationships, lives outlived. How does forever disappear? asks the speaker in his love-infused elegies for important people in his life. We are welcomed as trusted friends as we become privy to little secrets in the speaker’s pocket while he poses difficult questions and faces the facts of mortality – his own, or everyone else’s. Even though the larger theme in Absence Descending is death, the poetry is very much alive and every reader will be able to connect with these beautifully crafted, relatable poems.
—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House
Absence Descending is a meditation on midlife, a collection that is both holy and wholly human. In it, Bill Verble tenderly and masterfully explores the quiet bargainings we make as we navigate what it means to be in the middle – as we simultaneously face the mortality of loved ones, the ever-changing dynamic of growing children, and our own reckoning with impermanence. In these poems, Verble has captured ether, transforming universal experiences and emotions into a balm for others who are in the in-between, as he reminds us “Life surrenders in winter / making way for life.” I read Absence Descending with both an ache of recognition and a sigh of relief as I realized I’m not alone in deciding what to hold on to and what to discard, in wondering what it would feel like to be a ghost drifting through past lives, in fearing “my mother’s paradise / does not include / being my mother.” Absence Descending is one I will return to often as I seek to see spirit in the everyday and remember that none of us are alone in our human experience.
—Missy Brownson, author of Hush Candy
About the Author
Bill Verble is a poet from Lexington, Kentucky, where he works as a human resources director. His work has appeared in The Poeming Pigeon, Okay Donkey, Spare Parts Literary, and Yearling. He was honored to receive a Pushcart nomination in 2023. Bill has always been inspired to write by his father, who was a poet-in-residence for a school system many years ago. He currently serves as the treasurer for the Kentucky State Poetry Society. Most important to Bill is sharing his days with his dear wife Shannon, his children Kate and Liam, and two large, unruly cats.