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?