A Penance
“The elegantly armored, brutally beautiful poems that make up A Penance call to mind Wallace Stevens’s description of imaginative nobility as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.”… 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
“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