An Absence of Sea

Christina Tudor-Sideri

2026

at times oneiric confession at times philosophical contemplation in epistolary form An Absence of Sea unfolds as a breathless letter to the other a lover a double the sea time itself tracing the shadowed terrain where self meets its echo where longing takes on form where thought becomes touch moving through the quiet of solitude it follows the fragile carnal continuity of existence a gesture of return where the impossible is the only home that holds us a poetics of knowing and being known through the gaze through touch through the echo of another

"and the mind my love like Orpheus turns back and loses what it sought and from that loss it thinks a world and enacts a hermeneutics of rupture of catastrophe of the always already lost that we pretend to retrieve through logos yet what calls is not what is but what remains what haunts what resists what trembles at the threshold of touch what refuses to be grasped a haunting not of despair but of breath if there were no haunting there would be no thought closure veiled as truth the end of being and so I choose to keep the wound open I choose deferral and the book that never ends the book that writes itself into its own undoing I choose this letter this abyss and call it origin"

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"The apophatic and the ruined are bound together. To approach a thing by way of what it is not is to gather what is left of it after the thing itself has gone, in fragments, traces, the warmth in a wall, the warmth of a body departed, the gauze of half-memory, the absent beloved, the walls of stone crumbling into the sea, time slipping by, the soul lingering obliquely. An Absence of Sea moves among and gathers these absences." -- David Southard

ISBN 978-1-916541-27-6 // also available via retailers inc. Barnes&Noble, Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells, bol., Dussmann & bokus // Launch video