What is a song but a snare to capture the moment? Eric Pankey asks in his new collection, Crow-Work. This central question drives Pankeys ekphrastic exploration of the moment where emotion and energy flood a work of art. Through subjects as diverse as Brueghels Procession to Calvary, Anish Kapoors Healing of Saint Thomas, Caravaggios series of severed heads, and James Turrells experimentation with light and color, the author travels to an impossible past, despite being firmly rooted in the present, to seek out "e;the songbird in every thorn thicket"e; of the artist's work. Short bursts of lyrical beauty burn away like coils of incense ash, bodies in the light of a cave flicker, coalesce and disappear. By capturing the ephemeral beauty of life in these poems, Crow-Work seeks not only to explain great art, but also to embody it.