CJ Evans

“What Lives captures most inventively is the brittle, flibbertigibbet quality of our despair in the face of global catastrophe, the way in which our awareness of the impending destruction of the earth can exist beside the need to “try happiness” today, to choose our own lives over the spiraling abyss. . . . Evans affectingly molds and carves syntax to make tangible the contorted shape of experience at a time of impending catastrophe.”

— David Woo, Poetry Foundation

“Here are poems with music matched to matter, so that reading them often involves both swoon and startle: “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” Evans, writes, “the comets and giants. And also: / books, chamomile, and more kissing.” Panoramic in time and space, Lives knows each of us, our ordinary lives and our occupancy within history and the universe, our yearning for connection: “And if I turned to you now, my one wet muscle run dry, would you / turn to me? And what else could my heart be for if not to try?”

– Victoria Chang, author of OBIT

“Lives by CJ Evans annihilates the border between private and public, allowing either to seep into and become the other: ‘In/ coming inside into/ our secret room of hands.’ In languid lyrics lush as a crowd of firs, Evans finds in relentless detail a life bursting with freedom despite violence and captivity abounding. These poems revise the very act of love—on nature, children, and community—until even the way we live is forever changed. A fantastic collection.”

— Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior

Lives

“In Lives, CJ Evans acutely tunes into the signals emitted from finite and infinite worlds near and far—amidst perpetual violence, wars, and ecocide. The collected signals make up a stunning language that intricately weaves the personal and the political. Lives offers us a deeply intimate and prophetic observation of the now.”

— Don Mee Choi

A Penance

That Evans is able to convert such turmoil into complex, sonically rich, wide-awake and insightful poems is a testament not only to his artistry as a poet (it is immense) but also, ultimately, to an almost miraculous sense of hope.”

— Timothy Donnelly

The Category of outcast

“The poems of CJ Evans are as mysterious as they are precise… Contemporary in their fresh, elastic phrasing while classical in their omission of irony and slickness, these are truly lyrical poems: immediate and impressionistic; resonant and intense.”

— Terrance Hayes

CJ Evans’s most recent book, Lives, was selected by Victoria Chang for the Kathryn A. Morton Prize from Sarabande Books. He is also the author of A Penance (New Issues Press), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. The publisher & editor in chief of Two Lines Press, a publisher of international literature in translation, he was previously an editor at Tin House and worked at the Academy of American Poets. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, he lives in California for now.

Contact: cj.evans.poet[at]gmail.com

Lives

A Penance

The Category of outcast

Some poems online