"The Great Empty"
Poems by Gary Duehr
Now available for presale discount
from Finishing Line Press
During the first year of the Covid pandemic, I wrote one poem a day and posted them on Facebook and Instagram, as a way to provide a historical diary of the times and to connect to a larger community in the midst of isolation.
The poems are influenced by classic haiku images as well, such as falling snow, the trill of birds, and intimate daily life. The scope of the verse ranges from mundane observations to the larger political sphere, even touching on the 1918 flu epidemic.
The Great Empty is written in renga, a style of ancient Japanese verse like an extended haiku. The end of one poem links to the start of the next, as when they were created as a party game.
Full length, paperback, 5.5" x 8.5"
Released June 19, 2026
Presale discount: $20.99 through April 24 (regular price $22.99)
Click here to order presale from Finishing Line Press
Based in Boston, Gary Duehr teaches writing for local universities. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2001 he received an NEA Poetry Fellowship, and he has also received grants and fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His books of poetry include Point Blank (In Case of Emergency Press), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press). His children’s book in verse is Felicia the Ferret and the Atom Smasher from Thurston Howl Publications.
www.garyduehr.com
Excerpts from "The Great Empty"
The house still asleep.
On a pillow, her black hair
Tangled as seaweed.
How will you know when others
Rise to shadow the sidewalk?
*
Last flakes, slight shadows,
Streak past the kitchen window
To wipe out the sky.
March has swept the streets, but for
This face mask: smudged, torn blossom.
*
On a U.S. map,
The pale pink smudges swell up.
The fever aches, spikes.
You forget to sleep. Sleep stalls.
How to witness from afar?
Years after its peak, the COVID-19 pandemic will not leave us alone, much as we’d like to imagine its legacy is null. The Great Empty is an evocative contribution to the literature of that cataclysm. Gary Duehr vividly evokes the alienation and social abandonment which marked its onset, recalling what it was like when we learned it had gone far beyond a cruise-ship infestation. But the voice of this work does not settle for despair. The formal elegance and meditative quality of renga allow us space to attend to not only what disappeared, but also to what remains, to points of affirmation that are also still real. We need every strategy for resilience we can find.
—David Miller, author of Bend in the Stair and Sprawled Asleep
