Eric Pankey’s Twelfth Book Released This Fall

Eric Pankey’s Twelfth Book Released This Fall

Eric Pankey’s new book, Augury, is set for release on November 7th of 2017. Augury is Pankey’s 12th published collection of poems and artfully examines the divine within the seemingly mundane. Christopher Howell described Pankey's poems as, “marvelously meditative, no matter their topical content, because everything in them is brought to exist in a kind of space between perception and what is perceived, a space made somehow sacred by Pankey’s refusal to privilege one over the other, allowing both to simply be. The result is an unusually quiet and masterful work.”  

Praise for Augury
“In Augury, Eric Pankey speculates on the largest of human questions, searching for faith even while fully cognizant that ‘you can excavate the scents / but still not find the source.’ Ultimately, short of hard evidence, Augury risks it all on a belief in language, in the words and marks traced by humankind on a blank page. Faith may be found in the materiality of language itself, and Pankey’s deft skill with its music and image ‘both the large and the granular’ persuades us. These poems demonstrate an unparalleled command of the lyric and its capacious potential. In poems like dropped stitches, aphoristic sequences, and exquisitely lineated verse, language is placed under pressure to yield its seething dynamism and urgency.This is a book I will keep close at hand, alongside the best work of Montale, Dickinson, Celan, and Stevens. This is a book one will turn to again and again.“―Rebecca Dunham

“These pages are marked by the startling confidence of one who knows he does not know, who ‘at a loss for words,’ responds by writing poems. There is no more audacious act; there is no work more humble. Eric Pankey writes poems that give us back, if not the world, our relation to it―where we can learn from what resists understanding, where even withholding reveals, where the future includes all the past, and though the mind might be obliterated by the light it seeks, it seeks it still, in the ruins and in the orchard.”―Dan Beachy-Quick


“Reading Augury, I feel as if Eric Pankey were drawing my attention to an experience of human history in such profoundly reverse sensory order that it is ultimately turned entirely soul-ward―by which I mean neither inward nor outward exactly, but toward the condition in which all assumptions can and should be questioned. Gods, ghosts, artists, ruins and the more vivid pleasures of civilization abound, as do the sublime horrors and ecstatic wonders not merely of divination, but of our daily lives: the very mortal acts of breathing, learning, sensing, and feeling. ‘By shadow, I mean something luminescent,’ Pankey writes. Augury is nothing less than a darkly luminous book by a poet at the height of his considerable poetic power, both an achievement and a book to return to again and again.”―Kathy Fagan