Alias: prose poems

by Eric Pankey

Prose Poems by the Fairfax, Virginia poet

104 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Eric Pankey is the author of eight previous collections of poetry, most recently The Pear as One Example: New and Selected Poems 1984-2008 and Reliquaries. He is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, a Library of Virginia Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Field, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as numerous anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). He is currently Professor of English and Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Truth . . . has the substance of shadow," Pankey writes, and by such subcritical eddies of thought Alias makes its via negativa, familiar to poetry readers by now from the fragmented, discursively keening sentences of Maggie Nelson's recent work. This is particularly true of "By Another Route," a crown of three-paragraph prose meditations, often on a reading subject, and deploying the gender neutral nominative case. "The ladder's shadow, more solid than the ladder, holds up the wall." There's a narrative sub-current to this gender neutrality, and one hears in it the stirring of the "Et in Arcadia Ego" -- "even in Arcadia, I, Death, hold sway" -- death, then, is an Alias.