The 2022 Lena Shull Poetry Award Winner!!

Advance Praise for Engrams...

“I was immediately drawn to this manuscript by the voice. It’s inviting in its approach—never assuming, never too sharp—and eases us into a world of mystery to the western eye. It’s the voice that shapes the images in the poems—lush and shimmering to the dark and quiet. In short: the poems are real. They are witness to a foreign land where a step forward means a step outside of the confines of luxury, safety even, and into a world that opens itself for the self. Foreign as east to west, as the natural world to the manmade, as life to death. There is no going back. There is no eye for an escape back. Only forward and only witness. And that may be part of the genius of this beautiful collection.”

—Ray McManus

“The speaker of Engrams is one who transcribes her travels across Asia and returns to the U.S. with the keen and wise eye of a modern-day Zen master. A studious observer, she is at home with starlings, kestrels, and crows, on muddy riverbanks, in glittering caves, under moonlight. Her writing faithfully observes growth on all scales—from cities, to schoolchildren, to ghost pipe buds, (and even herself,) with honest, playful language. This collection is about travel, yes, but more than that, it’s about how you find yourself a different person in an altogether different world when you return home.”

—Emily Okamoto-Green

“The poems in Ana Pugatch’s debut collection of poetry, Engrams, are alert and unwavering in their keen consideration to things spiritual and material. In these poems of travel, the poet is far from home, from the familiar. The attention of her dislocation makes each poem luminous, radiant, vivid, and immediate. The poems—quiet, searching, careful—possess the beautiful, seemingly impossible, and off-kilter balance one finds in a cairn along a pilgrim’s way. The poems seem almost to levitate, to defy gravity with their accuracy, clarity, and mystery.”

—Eric Pankey

Ana Pugatch is a Pushcart-nominated poet. She received her M.F.A. from George Mason University, where she was awarded the ’20- ’21 Poetry Heritage Fellowship. Before then she lived in Asia, teaching English in China and Thailand, as well as studying Buddhism. Ana’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, among other places, and her poems have won the Atlantis Award and the McIntyre Light Verse Award. She holds an Ed.M. from Harvard and a B.A. from Skidmore College. She now lives in Raleigh, NC with her husband and son. You can find more of her work on her website, www.anapugatch.com.