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Easy Tiger
A dunce cap on a dog. The world’s largest sausage. A giraffe crippled by blocks of color. Aircraft carriers bristling with pastel light…
The enchanted prose poems and minimalist collages in Evan Nicholls’ Easy Tiger combine to create a multimedia journey into reorganizing the mundane. Born out of a fascination with common sayings, turns of phrase, and the absurd, Easy Tiger is about love, family, assurance, and doubt. Featuring cats and canines, pelicans, a komodo dragon, a vampire deer, ducks in hats, a melancholy gun, pinks, blues, yellows, reds, and greens, Nicholls’ dynamic collection is exceptionally fun–both easy to read and hard to swallow, lovingly mapping out a world that will have you laughing and sobbing into your chainmail sleeve.
If you need something in your backpack that’s exciting and strange and innovative, put Easy Tiger by Evan Nicholls in there. It’s a book that ambushes all expectations. The works in Easy Tiger freeze me, ask me to get down on my knees with the sweet wet leaves, examine every phrase and idiom and gesture and image with more curiosity and appreciation. Rather than rabbits, fire emerges from this magician’s hat. So many final lines in this book leave me baffled and laughing. I’ll be looking for the latest Evan Nicholls for years to come.
— Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, author of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy
Easy, tiger, language is a wild animal. It doesn’t obey the rules of the IRS unless it’s the internal rendezvous service. It’s on fire, like an arrow in the heart, the father of a gun, a many-skinned onion that cries on every level because collages are poems and poems are collages. The world is a collage and so is Evan Nicholls’ beautiful, marvellous and inventive Easy Tiger. It’s our world— wondrous, strange, worrying, magic, hilarious and filled with both danger and comet light. “Amazing place this earth, the way it makes you/stay holding onto it with no hands.” So hold tight, this book has all the feels of a popemobile driven by the moon.
— Gary Barwin, author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory
Easy Tiger is America’s freaky dreaming! Little surreal images and wonder-filled sentences in scalpel-short poems, where everything spins and shoots in all directions. Here, there is a joyful refusal to become jaded, a relentless commitment to the weird and strange, a breeziness as response to the world’s nonsense from Nicholls’ candy-poem dispenser. From parlour tricks and wipeable toucans, emu knights and pinball machines, to pillow factories, triceratops and Orangina spokespersons, this is the world you enter at your own gleeful peril. The amusement tax is on Evan Nicholls, so inhale the tiny complexities and absurd escalations and behold the scenes that play out in the rainbow-sprinkled fumes you exhale.
— Vik Shirley, author of Some Deer
Evan Nicholls’ Easy Tiger features gemlike poems and poem-like collages that knot together life and myth in tiny, anti-tall tales and fragments thereof. Fun to read and minimalistically expansive.
— Mark Leidner, author of Returning the Sword to the Stone
All Evan Nicholls’ poems need are two things. He just puts them together, like feathers on a horse. One of those things is another thing, and the other thing is a word, like cake or boat or moon, for example. It hardly matters. It could be anything! There’s a recklessness to it. Once, it was the word word between two s’s. All I’m saying is watch out! Tigers aren’t the only animals in Evan’s poems. Other animals in these poems include goat, horse, cat, dog, deer, cake, fish, snake, moon, eagle, pope, boat, egret, and fly, among many others.
Actually, put this wizardry back where it came from.
— Zachary Schomburg, author of Pulver Maar
Evan Nicholls is a poet and collage artist from Virginia. He is the author of two books of poetry and collage, Holy Smokes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and Easy Tiger (Future Tense Books, 2025). He is also co-author of There Has Been a Murder (Ghost City Press, 2022), a poetry micro whodunnit written with Evan Williams and Benjamin Niespodziany. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his cat, Uni.
Cover design and book design by Angelo Maneage
The enchanted prose poems and minimalist collages in Evan Nicholls’ Easy Tiger combine to create a multimedia journey into reorganizing the mundane. Born out of a fascination with common sayings, turns of phrase, and the absurd, Easy Tiger is about love, family, assurance, and doubt. Featuring cats and canines, pelicans, a komodo dragon, a vampire deer, ducks in hats, a melancholy gun, pinks, blues, yellows, reds, and greens, Nicholls’ dynamic collection is exceptionally fun–both easy to read and hard to swallow, lovingly mapping out a world that will have you laughing and sobbing into your chainmail sleeve.
If you need something in your backpack that’s exciting and strange and innovative, put Easy Tiger by Evan Nicholls in there. It’s a book that ambushes all expectations. The works in Easy Tiger freeze me, ask me to get down on my knees with the sweet wet leaves, examine every phrase and idiom and gesture and image with more curiosity and appreciation. Rather than rabbits, fire emerges from this magician’s hat. So many final lines in this book leave me baffled and laughing. I’ll be looking for the latest Evan Nicholls for years to come.
— Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, author of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy
Easy, tiger, language is a wild animal. It doesn’t obey the rules of the IRS unless it’s the internal rendezvous service. It’s on fire, like an arrow in the heart, the father of a gun, a many-skinned onion that cries on every level because collages are poems and poems are collages. The world is a collage and so is Evan Nicholls’ beautiful, marvellous and inventive Easy Tiger. It’s our world— wondrous, strange, worrying, magic, hilarious and filled with both danger and comet light. “Amazing place this earth, the way it makes you/stay holding onto it with no hands.” So hold tight, this book has all the feels of a popemobile driven by the moon.
— Gary Barwin, author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory
Easy Tiger is America’s freaky dreaming! Little surreal images and wonder-filled sentences in scalpel-short poems, where everything spins and shoots in all directions. Here, there is a joyful refusal to become jaded, a relentless commitment to the weird and strange, a breeziness as response to the world’s nonsense from Nicholls’ candy-poem dispenser. From parlour tricks and wipeable toucans, emu knights and pinball machines, to pillow factories, triceratops and Orangina spokespersons, this is the world you enter at your own gleeful peril. The amusement tax is on Evan Nicholls, so inhale the tiny complexities and absurd escalations and behold the scenes that play out in the rainbow-sprinkled fumes you exhale.
— Vik Shirley, author of Some Deer
Evan Nicholls’ Easy Tiger features gemlike poems and poem-like collages that knot together life and myth in tiny, anti-tall tales and fragments thereof. Fun to read and minimalistically expansive.
— Mark Leidner, author of Returning the Sword to the Stone
All Evan Nicholls’ poems need are two things. He just puts them together, like feathers on a horse. One of those things is another thing, and the other thing is a word, like cake or boat or moon, for example. It hardly matters. It could be anything! There’s a recklessness to it. Once, it was the word word between two s’s. All I’m saying is watch out! Tigers aren’t the only animals in Evan’s poems. Other animals in these poems include goat, horse, cat, dog, deer, cake, fish, snake, moon, eagle, pope, boat, egret, and fly, among many others.
Actually, put this wizardry back where it came from.
— Zachary Schomburg, author of Pulver Maar
Evan Nicholls is a poet and collage artist from Virginia. He is the author of two books of poetry and collage, Holy Smokes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and Easy Tiger (Future Tense Books, 2025). He is also co-author of There Has Been a Murder (Ghost City Press, 2022), a poetry micro whodunnit written with Evan Williams and Benjamin Niespodziany. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his cat, Uni.
Cover design and book design by Angelo Maneage
152 pages, Paperback
Published June 6, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 7, 2025
Reminiscent of Mark Baumer but entirely its own.
“Amazing place this earth, the way it makes you
stay holding onto it with no hands”
Yes!
“Amazing place this earth, the way it makes you
stay holding onto it with no hands”
Yes!
July 15, 2025
I hold that Evan Nicholls is a scholar of deep sense. In poems and retitled images of original origin, the work as pasted into the copied beginnings of Easy Tiger is one or seven of an insistent reluctance to write what came before as a prayer overheard in a chapel erected in a field leftward of the anchored fact of our uselessness. I opened my gaze to the fish-caught world. I found my hopelessness still hopeless but tenderly surrounded by the brutally beheld. I’m not sure this is absurd. Nicholls plucks from our humanness its exiled objectifications and places them on a mood board for belonging to the extracted. Collage, sure, but collage rescued from its overlooked layering. Not just anything goes. This is sorrow cooking for a sadness that’s gained an appetite in a place voided of elsewhere. This is a comet losing god’s ashes. Blood gluing itself together in a pencil dreaming of a horse trying to sleep in a tree. What angel slang. What a deadline given to forever. Ah, Barton. Easy there brother. Anyway, imagine putting your finger on all the touch in the world. Then try.
June 26, 2025
Very odd, nearly fable-ish, poems live amongst equally weird collages. Taken as an entire scope, there's something that feels ancient and absurd, like comical koans. While working on this book with the young Mr. Nicholls (full disclosure: I'm his publisher), he explained to me that he was trying to create pieces in "as few moves as possible." At times, this Zen approach shines through, making this unique reading experience like floating on an echo of clouds. Somehow it's both disturbing and peaceful.
January 29, 2026
Oddball yet cozy poems next to dazzling collages. A masterclass in brevity and minimalism. This is a multimedia book unlike any other. Fabulist, hallucinatory, funny, and packed with a sincere empathy, a book where you're not sure if you should be chuckling or growing teary-eyed. I recommend you do both.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews