02/06/2026
The editors at Apogee Press are thrilled to announce the publication of Stephen Hemenway’s new book, untitled ocean.
Contemporary culture drowns us in stimulus, an
omnipresent noise that saturates our consciousness. These quiet poems are a kind of antidote, a soft and subtle music that requires attentive listening.
Here we find a commitment to a deliberately simple language, a careful transparency, and to poems that are meditations in the best sense of the word.
Within the consistent discipline of the originality of its language, untitled ocean includes many different kinds of poems: poems of intimate personal grief and loss, reflections on people living together and the destructive violence of war, poems that experiment with the space of the page, and a compelling exploration of climate change.
We’re honored to have published this completely original and deeply moving book.
This essential collection moves the reader from the elegiac to a poetry in which, with a photographer’s eye, we “hold reality still for observation”. Grief is mitigated by a lyric repositioning of the physical self in slowed time, precisely noting patterns in the human body as well as in urban...
