A Penance

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