The History of the Siege

Prose poems that chronicle the eschatological age in which we live.

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 in which we live, 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.