An Absence of Fear

Unpretentious, finely crafted, and luminous in their depth of feeling, the collected poems of Holly Peppe reflect a love for language and its nuances. They vary in mood and tone, incorporating vivid observations of people and places, insights into human wants and needs, and dark humor disguising fears that are often all too real: “We laugh when we run out of fear.” 

An Absence of Fear offers readers a primer on how to be sensitive to the world around us while living every day to the fullest, even after learning it might be our last.

$14.95
ISBN: 979-8-89138-397-5
Imprint: Amplify Publishing
SKU: 18-1352-01
Categories:Amplify Publishing, Memoirs and Biographies

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, poet, translator, scholar, author of Muna Lee: A Pan-American Life, and translator of Pedro Mir’s Poems of Good Love...and Sometimes Fantasy

Holly Peppe

Author, Poet, Teacher, and Literary Executor for Edna St. Vincent Millay

Holly Peppe—author, poet, editor, teacher, and mentor—is a leading authority and literary executor for the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her critical essays about the poet’s life and work appear in the Penguin Classics, Harper’s, and Yale University Press editions of her poems. Peppe also wrote an anti-bullying book for children, Sophie and the Swans, and co-authored two Scholastic books for young adults about Barrington Irving, the first Black pilot and youngest aviator to fly solo around the world, and Mum’s the Word, a memoir about Eve Branson, British philanthropist, child welfare advocate, and mother of Richard Branson, the colorful British entrepreneur.

Peppe served as Director of the English Department at the American College of Rome, Italy in the 1980s before returning to Connecticut to teach film and literature programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities. She holds a Master of Arts in teaching from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of New Hampshire.

In addition to her literary work, Peppe represented individuals and groups committed to education, the arts, health issues, gender equality, and human rights in her thirty-year career as a global media, public relations, and crisis communications strategist. She spent eight years traveling to developing countries with ORBIS International, a nonprofit health organization, before founding her own PR firm in Manhattan, where her clients included the United Nations Office of Children and Armed Conflict. She also managed and promoted a diverse clientele including the acclaimed New York magician Steve Cohen. In earlier years, she taught music at an elementary school in rural Vermont and attended Woodstock, a treasured memory from her hippie days.

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