Robert L. Penick

The poetry and prose of Robert L. Penick have appeared in well over 100 different literary journals, including The Hudson Review, North American Review, Plainsongs, and Oxford Magazine. His latest chapbook is Exit, Stage Left, by Slipstream Press. The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hohm Press, and more of his work can be found at theartofmercy.net

Robert L. Penick’s short, masterful poems have been showing up in small press magazines since the early 1990s. The Art of Mercy, his first full-length collection, contains excerpts from four chapbooks as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems, representing the best of a long, quiet career in the poetry trenches.

“Penick is gritty. Like the photographer who finds beauty in abandoned houses and cracked surfaces, his work makes the reader appreciate the sweat, dust, and failure we brush against, then turn our minds from. He is the tour guide of the ignored. He demands a broadening of our humanity and he does so with hope, precision, and humility.

– Cliff Wieck, author of Hagiography and Bestiary