"There is no end to this desert / or the playfulness of blackbirds" reads the opening two lines of Evans' extraordinary new collection, a fitting start for a book of poems that simultaneously mourns a past that can never be recovered and also finds regeneration and renewal in the act of creation. This image reveals one the book's central conceits: a quest for meaning in a dead and dying world, a journey at once playful and profound. For Evans, the act of writing is its own cenotaph, a marker that reminds us of what's lost while inspiring us with its careful artistic craftsmanship.
―
Jeff Newberry
, author of
How to Talk About the Dead
and
Cross Country
Two worlds inhabit Justin Evans'
Cenotaph
, 'one of flesh and one of bone.' When I think of an empty tomb I think of darkness, yet
is full of light. In this elegiac, evocative collection the Great Basin Desert is where the light dazzles-in the mornings where Evans finds hope in the resolve of each new day, and at dusk with its call for prayer. Evans sits with his dead in a landscape full of life, 'There is breath here, and breeze / that carries our song across the land.' He resists the heaviness of the past, and reveals in vivid, lyrical language 'not everything / is lost' that the dead and the living remain friends. Justin Evans'
is a powerful psalm for those of us present and for those who have passed on.
-
Suzanne Frischkorn
Fixed Star