“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
Books
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 newest 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. Currently 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 now.
