Eric Pankey is the author of eight previous collections of poetry, most recently The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008. He is currently Professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and lives in Fairfax, Virginia.
"In this age of both religious extremism and cynical atheism, Eric Pankey's poems gleam with authenticity. From his earliest work, his abiding interest has been in probing the place where human consciousness confronts what lies outside of our understanding. The poems are prayers sent into the unknown, for 'one must penetrate the invisible to reside in the visible.' One of their great pleasures is the door through which Pankey enters the mysteries: the natural world, with which he has profound intimacy. In language that is always elegant, complex, and rigorously truthful, he transfixes us with glimpses of what we can never fully know. Trace is a brilliant furthering of this mission."
—Chase Twitchell
"Beauty-struck, dark with yearning, melancholy, and unlooked-for, salvific joy, these new poems extend Pankey's already capacious and original vision of the God-hungry, remnant self, and thus the lyric poem itself, in inimitably haunted and haunting ways."
—Lisa Russ Spaar
Milkweed Editions
