This title features imaginative verses rending the radical from the drudgery of corporate cubicles and army bases and from the banality of modern existence. Selected by David Baker,
Green Revolver
is the fifth annual winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize and the first published collection by Worthy Evans. These verses resulted from a spontaneous outpouring of poems, pent up during a fourteen-year hiatus from the craft during which Evans worked as a professional reporter, writer, and editor. Much informed by the rapid-fire pace and cadence of his journalism background, Evans’ narrative poems are grounded in concrete images of our shared reality and explore a range of imaginative versions of the poet as confident or frightened, loving or hateful, bold or timid, lost or profound. These poems seek a distinguishing personal truth - a sense of belonging in a world not altogether welcoming, or even that familiar, where violent impulses are as threatening as workday drudgery. In these daydreams given form, Henry Fonda wields the same authority as Henry-V or Ward Cleaver. In this landscape where the familiar arches longingly toward the surreal, a cockeyed visionary might just find the right fantasy with which to escape the stultifying confinement of banal modernity, as represented by corporate office space and khaki dress slacks, army motor pools and basic training maneuvers, sprawling cityscapes and the omnipresent pestering responsibilities of adulthood in postmillennial America. Born in Winter Park, Florida, at the same time Walt Disney World was being completed, Worthy Evans grew up in several South Carolina towns. Evans is a graduate of the College of Charleston who has served as a U.S. Army combat engineer, an award-winning local sports reporter, a copy editor for an independent scholarly publisher, and a corporate communication specialist. Whether gainfully employed or unemployed, in the bleachers or in a cubicle, Evans has remained a poet at heart, cultivating the verses found here in his first book. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.