Cj Evans

2021 Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry “The book is intimate, expansive, and in moments, willfully hopeful.” —Victoria Chang, winner of the PEN Voelcker Award for OBIT 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?”

Poetry. "There is an uneasy tenderness to C. J. Evans's A PENANCE. His poems trouble desire, they trouble the world ('The world is furious and I'm so tired / of being furious with it.') until it fractures into the sort of captivating music a modern day Orpheus might sing: 'they know I'll end in their arms, and how tenderly / they'll rip my body.' Evans articulates the violence as well as the beauty of passion with a style that is assured and impressionistic, haunting and precise. He is a magnificent poet. This is a magnificent debut." Terrance Hayes"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.' They present a psyche no less troubled by the ruthlessness of reality than by its own strong appetite for escapism the work of a mind that thinks 'it's striking / how much dark there is // in this world that houses / diamonds and rivers' even as it questions its own 'wish for a pillowed world // where we slip into / each others' arms and then let fall.' 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"