Shanti Arts is an independent publishing company whose work is grounded in nature, art, and spirit. We are located in Brunswick, Maine, producing poetry and non-fiction books, and a quarterly literary and art journal—Still Point Arts Quarterly.

 

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Author Biography

Endorsements

Articles & Reviews

Absence ◆  Presence

by Christien Gholson

Print (softcover) $14.95  

 

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Influenced by T’ang Era Classical poets (including Han Shan, Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei), the poems in Christien Gholson’s Absence ◆ Presence explore our collapsing world with the Daoist understanding that everything in the cosmos (Presence) appears out of and returns to an unknowable mysterious origin (Absence); and that we are continually shifting in and out of Absence and Presence—day to day, month to month, year to year, moment to moment. Alternatively playful and dark (and sometimes playfully dark), these accessible poems move through the cycle of the seasons, including death, work, dragons, war, coyotes, loss, mass shootings, ghost deer, love, drought, fever dreams and joy, all with a stunned and quiet awe at the beauty hidden everywhere in plain sight. Along the way, we come into contact with a character named No One, resembling the illusive monk-poet Han Shan, seeking answers in the midst of our collapsing civilization, trying to move toward a larger experience of the self, a self that includes community, the natural world, and even the night cosmos, cultivating, like the Classical Chinese poets, a broader and deeper experience of the self.

POETRY / General

ISBN: 978-1-956056-69-3 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2022951747

Copyright: 2023; Released 1-17-2023

108 pages

Author Biography

Christien Gholson is the author of several books of poetry, including On the Side of the Crow (Hanging Loose Press) and All the Beautiful Dead (Bitter Oleander Press); along with a novel: A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind (Parthian Books). His chapbooks include The No One Poems (Thirty West Publishing) and The Sixth Sense (Modest Proposal Chapbook series). Several of his chapbooks can be found online, including Tidal Flats (Mudlark) and How the World was Made (2River View). He has been many shapes before attaining congenial form: factory worker, cashier, crow feather resting on snow, bookseller, editor, crab leg tangled in seaweed, teacher, farmhand, ochre handprint on a cave wall, union organizer and wanderer. He attended Naropa University; University of California, Davis; and Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work has appeared in Ecotone, Permafrost, Another Chicago Magazine, Banyan Review, The Shore, Hotel Amerika, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tiger Moth Review, and The Sun, among many other literary journals. He spent many years living in northcentral New Mexico where the poems in Absence  Presence were written. He now works as a somatic-oriented therapist in Oregon.

     

Endorsements

Read the poems in Christien Gholson’s new book, The Next World. Breathe them deeply in. Live with them awhile. They are, in a word, “oracular” —all the proof I require that Gholson himself is that rare thing, a latter-day “technician of the sacred.” Amen. — William Slaughter Editor of Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics; Author of Untold Stories and The Politics of My Heart

Articles and Reviews

Christien Gholson, Absence : Presence



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