Lives
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?”
CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press) and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and currently lives in California, where he is the editorial director of Two Lines Press, a publisher of international literature in translation.
