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The History of the Siege
by Eric Pankey
Written and gathered together in an era of pandemic, rising authoritarianism, war, and climate crisis, the prose poems in Eric Pankey’s The History of the Siege chronicle the eschatological age we live in, where everyone, as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert argues, “suffers from a loss of the sense of time.” Pankey, in his third collection of prose poems, continues to investigate the formal and rhetorical possibilities of this already subversive genre. In a 1987 interview, Zbigniew Herbert said, “It is vanity to think that one can influence the course of history by writing poetry. It is not the barometer that changes the weather.” While these poems—sometimes solemn, sometimes hermetic, sometimes funny—do not attempt to influence history, they do hope to capture what it is like to live within history, and it looks like, as the old song says, we’re in for nasty weather.
Ember Days
by Mary Gilliland
The rivetting poems of Ember Days begin with ritual and end with prayer as they tunnel through Wednesday’s jammed boulevards, Friday’s cash worthless, Saturday’s prodigal feet. Plant disease incurable as colonialism inhabits nature’s solace; funds for libraries disappear, abandoned houses compel secrets. Woolf’s pen runs dry, Tesla holes up, Lincoln emerges in yet another bardo. Soldiers in Baghdad, models transformed to artists, descendants of forced immigrants, survivors of hurricanes, witnesses for peace—these and other intercessory voices step up to our world’s disasters, level with its possibilities, interrogate faith, justice, militarism, madness, and the perception and affection of intimate relationships.
The Lights Around the Shore
by Steven Lewis
When grumpy 75 year old Charlie Messina wakes from a coma after a cardiac event on Cape Cod, he is told that he was only unconscious for a few days. However, Charlie knows he has spent the last several months living through a parallel life that lies ahead of him. Which includes a personal tragedy, an unlikely awkward friendship with two local boys, and a road trip with his playboy best friend from college and a dog that no else sees (except the children). When he shares his story about the life he lived, his wife and grown sons think he’s crazy. He then realizes he must play along with his family—and the geriatric psychiatrist—or they’ll be convinced he’s suffering dementia and will put him into a home for “dribblers and droolers.”
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Codhill Catalog
There is no more important function of writing at this time than to call us to awaken. The state of siege under which human consciousness—human conscience—is living has not abated in the time since Blake wrote. The seriousness of the situation has only intensified. To serve our memory of what is truly important: to that the writer should be a guide.