Lives

by C.J. Evans, Victoria Chang (Introduction)

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 “When it folds open, the rule-less rile / of sky,” Evans, writes, “the comets and giants. And / 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 “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?”

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published June 14, 2022

About the author

CJ Evans is the author of A Penance, forthcoming from New Issues Press in October, and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He co-edited, with Brenda Shaughnessy, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, and his work has appeared in journals such as Boston Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is editor of Two Lines Press, which publishes contemporary international literature in translation, and a contributing editor for Tin House. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, daughter, and three-legged cat.