The Future Perfect

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In The Future Perfect: A Fugue, Eric Pankey tells us 'what matters is the miscellany, ' our 'unkempt days loosely stitched to the next....' Still, he'll confess, 'one could lose sleep making sense of the grab bag of all the this and the that.' How can we not 'project into the future, ' not 'see the past as portent?' he writes. 'How does one avoid thinking about the void?' One disquieting question follows upon another in this chapbook's single polyphonic poem. In lieu of answers, Pankey offers us the pleasure of his ever-gorgeous music. From such a virtuoso, 'these notes, these intervals' are all we could ask for."-Allison Funk "The scope of the collection is epic-dance is created, the Minotaur faces the maze, stone tools disappear, Thomas the Doubter touches the wound, and ultimately the future seems one of vanishing, both for the earth and for the individual: 'the murmur of ink drying.' Everything is transitory, yet we watch the narrator visualize the here and now in bushes swamped in purple blossoms, a house on fire, an opaque sky, moons, pulses of rain, light in its many forms. Images appear and disappear, repeat and interweave as in a musical fugue, the impersonal voice questioning the simultaneity of what is happening, the unkempt past, memory itself. What is most moving for me is watching what the narrator calls the apparition of a body practicing presence. It is that hesitancy, that acknowledged effort-these poems."-Martha Ronk