“If only words were salt—soluble, savory, vital, electric,” Eric Pankey writes in “Variations on Hadrian’s Animula,” one of many virtuosic works in Vestiges: Notes, Responses, and Essays 1988 – 2018. In this diverse collection of lyrical prose, Pankey assays his personal-poetic history with passion, brilliance, and grace. He considers the works of many great poets—Dickinson, Stevens, Donne, Hopkins, Merwin, Justice, Levis, and Lorca, to name just a few—invoking them as teachers and guides....

With Dismantling the Angel, Eric Pankey shows once more why he is one of the American poets I admire most. These are such deeply moving, humane, and thoughtful poems.” —KEVIN PRUFER

In his eighteenth collection of poetry,Eric Pankey continues his forty-year investigation into how and what one can know in this world and beyond it. The poet, Jane Hirshfield, says about his poetry, “Eric Pankey is a poet of precise observation and startling particularities. His wisdom, sometimes sidelong, sometimes direct, both knows and feels. The soundcraft is superb, the modes of investigation by turns lyrical, surreal, meditative, allegorical, direct-speaking, and allusive.”P...

From award-winning poet and author of Crow-Work, a collection exploring the presence of the divine in the seemingly ordinary.The ancient Romans practiced augury, reading omens in bird's flight patterns. In the poems of Augury, revelation is found in nature's smallest details: a lizard's quick movements, a tree scarred by lighting, the white curve of a snail's shell. Here the sensory world and the imagined one collide in unexpected and wonderful way...

From the award-winning author of Augury, a poetry collection that examines the power of great works of art."What is a song but a snare to capture the moment?" This central question drives Crow-Work, Eric Pankey's ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art.Through subjects as diverse as Bruegel's Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoor's Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio's series of sever...

A Walt Whitman Award–winning poet seeks the spiritual within everyday physical objects in this luminous collection.Taking its name from the Roman goddess of wisdom and her companion bird, Owl of Minerva turns astonishingly precise attention to the physical world, scouring it for evidence of the spiritual as the poet travels through such places as Appalachia, New England, Venice, Spain, the Caribbean, and the American Midwest. Along the way, Eric Pankey pon...

From the award-winning poet behind Owl of Minerva, a collection of poems exploring themes of faith, memory, and meaning.His arresting ninth collection of poems, Eric Pankey's Trace locates itself at a threshold between faith and doubt—between the visible and the invisible, the say-able and the ineffable, the physical and the metaphysical. Also a map of the poet's journey into a deep depression, these poems confront one man's struggle to overcome d...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureThe First Four Books of Poems collects the early work that established Louise Gluck as one of America's most original and important poets.Honored with the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, Gluck was celebrated early in her career for her fierce, austerely beautiful voice. In Firstborn, The House on Marshland, Descending Figure, and The Triumph of Achilles, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, we see the consciou...

"These poems, like light, clarify even as they pierce." — PUBLISHERS WEEKLYSelected for the National Poetry Series by Martha Collins, Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse.Here violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow ex...

In this mesmerizing debut collection, chosen by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series, we’re witness to an expansive travelogue of the human spirit that moves throughtfully through multiples ages, cultures, and beings. Each poem explores in depth, through pensive, evocative images, aspects of the human condition and their place within the rich continuum of animal existence. W.B. Keckler presents these poems in a fugal form, uniting the individual works in what he describes as a “holis...

Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," wr...

About Threshold Songs, the voices in these poems perform at the interior thresholds encountered each day, where we negotiate the unfathomable proximities of knowing and not knowing, the gulf of seeing and feeling, the uncanny relation of grief to joy, and the borderless nature of selfhood and tradition. Both conceptual and haunted, these poems explore the asymmetry of the body's chemistry and its effects on expression and form. The poems in Threshold Songs tune us to the microtonal music o...