Erica Funkhouser's poetry finds in the natural world a leaping-off point for all types of human inquiry: physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Her fourth collection, Pursuit, gives us poems devoted to the details of living, poems that illustrate how a domestic moment may turn suddenly erotic or how a wave of grief may open inexplicably into triumph. Whether driven by elemental need or sublime desire, the inhabitants of these thought-provoking poems engage in seeking of every kind.

Houghton Mifflin

“Erica Funkhouser's piercing considerations of the quotidian combine her gift for both lyric and narrative poetry. Looking closely at a wide variety of characters, and in studies of nature, she crafts a scrupulous and beautiful poetic world.”

Dennis Loy Johnson, The Orlando Sentinel 

“True both to their lyric and narrative impulses, the poems in Erica Funkhouser’s Pursuit do what we want poetry to do – at once settling and unsettling us in the world.”

Eamon Grennan 

From the book ...