Ali Lewis is a writer and editor. He received an Eric Gregory Award for his pamphlet, Hotel (Verve, 2020), and his poems and short stories have appeared in the London Magazine, the TLS, Poetry Review, and the New Statesman, as well as in Poetry London, where he was Associate Editor. From the desolation at the heat-death of the universe to the impassable distance between two people talking, and from the trust exercise of walking in darkness to experiments on the vacuum, Absence searches for what's missing and what we never had.