Lives

by CJ Evans, Victoria Chang (Introduction)

Overview

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?”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946448965
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

CJ Evans is the author of A Penance (New Issues Press) and The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets chapbook series. He received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and currently lives in California, where he is the editorial director of Two Lines Press, a publisher of international literature in translation. 

Read an Excerpt

Now That the Time for Lives Getting Better is Done

Sometimes I think there are no more happy stories in me, but do you know there’s a quasar named ULAS J1120+0641? It’s nearly
29 billion light years away. That such a thing is, and we get to know.

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?
So far away, we only see the image of the quasar as it was at the beginning. It’s burned out now, the fact of its death already riding toward us, hidden behind all the light that has ever been.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

1

Jupiter Is Blind 3

Crow 5

What the Seas Would Make Us 7

Fathering in the Discord 8

My Razorwire 9

Alone on the Ark with Sirius 12

Since the Last Shooting, Until the Next Shooting 14

A Lesson about Suicide 16

2

Trying to Hear a Hymn to Life 21

3

An Orchard Is a Forest We Broke 37

We think we're god enough to destroy it 38

If It Gives, It Gives 39

Stopping in Death Valley 40

To a Wild Place 42

A Few Questions for You 43

Night Terrors in America 44

After the iPhone 45

Metamorphosis 46

Down Where Lives Are Lived 47

Coyote in the Desert, Gasoline Splashed Around 48

There were never any answers and that's the only one. 49

Today You Will Not Die a Horrible Death 50

Unlock 51

As yesterday and tomorrow we await war, so the news is war as always. 52

In my fear for you, I fear 53

Cliffs Down to the Sea 54

Addict Exercise 55

In this poem without you I'm alone as uranium ore 56

At the Old Tideline 57

Not Knott's Naomi 58

My Mother's Bottle of Scotch 59

As We Watch Our Empire's End 60

All the Wild Hides 61

To peel sod or muck in reed roots with catfish bellies 62

Heavy 63

Now That the Time for Lives Getting Better Is Done 64

Every Ending Should Make a Sound 65

Today I Wanted to Try Happiness 66

Persimmons 67

4

Elegy in Limestone 71

Within the Cinder the Spark 73

Colony Collapse 75

Inquiry into Storm 76

Inquiry into Vesper 77

Inquiry into Cotton 79

Inquiry into Apricot 80

Goodnight to the Titans 81

Still Life with Love and No Lights 83

The dandelions in the moment and then 84

Acknowledgments 87

Editorial Reviews

"The perceptive, atmospheric second work from Evans (A Penance) is divided into four sections whose poems are both intimate and expansive...full of finely crafted lines and carefully unfolding narratives.'And what else could my heart be for if not to try?' Evans writes in 'Time for Lives Getting Better Is Done,' capturing the spirit of this searching collection."
—Publishers Weekly

"Today’s poem models how we might, if given the chance once again, dignify the earth and its inhabitants with our attention, so that seeing, and seeing deeply, evolves into care and reverence."
—Major Jackson on the poem "Night Terrors in America," The Slowdown Show

"What Lives captures most inventively is the brittle, flibbertigibbet quality of our despair in the face of global catastrophe, the way in which our awareness of the impending destruction of the earth can exist beside the need to “try happiness” today, to choose our own lives over the spiraling abyss....Evans affectingly molds and carves syntax to make tangible the contorted shape of experience at a time of impending catastrophe."
—David Woo, Poetry Foundation

“CJ Evans’s beautiful book, Lives, explores and circles around, into and out of what it means to be free and alive in a world where humans insist on war and environmental destruction. . . . The book is intimate, expansive, and in moments, willfully hopeful. As Evans writes: ‘here is a price I’ve exacted/to live, a shadow in which nothing else could grow, /but since I’m here I’d love.’”
—Victoria Chang, winner of the PEN Voelcker Award for OBIT

“In a middle of our mad world, what can a poet say in defense of lyric arts? ‘My only defense / is the leap of that spotted deer’ says CJ Evans, and gets it just right. Here is the poet who hears crows ‘in electrical sockets and in airplanes / and in the arteries in my arms’, a poet who insists of speaking of rain which ‘falls as if all these woods / weren't owned.’ Here, also, is a poet who can write with incredible power about school shootings, and suicide, yes, a poet who knows that every orchard is a forest we broke, and yet also stands up to the abyss that surrounds us, and produces an abundance of his hymn to life. That takes a lot. That takes a skill and the will power for life. But there is more: there is a metaphysician who asks ‘why do we even bother to be in our bodies if / we just aim to break them,’ who asks ‘how do I keep cutting these flowers / when they cover so many crowded graves.’ This is wisdom, friends. And I, for one, am grateful. Grateful, too, for beauty that is always found in these pages. And for the reminder to pay attention to ‘lines as they /break at the edges of a mouth,’ and to the moments that make the lyric of our lives.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“Lives by CJ Evans annihilates the border between private and public, allowing either to seep into and become the other: ‘In/ coming inside into/ our secret room of hands.’ In languid lyrics lush as a crowd of firs, Evans finds in relentless detail a life bursting with freedom despite violence and captivity abounding. These poems revise the very act of love—on nature, children, and community—until even the way we live is forever changed. A fantastic collection.”
—Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny and Thief in the Interior

“In Lives, CJ Evans acutely tunes into the signals emitted from finite and infinite worlds near and far—amidst perpetual violence, wars, and ecocide. The collected signals make up a stunning language that intricately weaves the personal and the political. Lives offers us a deeply intimate and prophetic observation of the now.”
—Don Mee Choi, winner of the National Book Award for DMZ Colony

Past praise:

“Evans’s debut connects his own sense of the visible world, with all its plants and animals, its “cruel devices,” to metaphors and examples drawn from an underworld of prisons and mean streets….his depth of emotion is real, and rare.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“There is an uneasy tenderness to CJ 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, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

“A few things make this debut collection neither predictable nor conventional, the most impressive of which is a riveting combination of intensity and accessibility. Beautiful lines are not new to poetry, but beauty and approachability don’t always chat each other up in contemporary poetry. Evans wants to change that.”
—Huffington Post

“San Francisco’s CJ Evans crashes between rage and romanticism in his debut collection.”
—Vanity Fair

From the Publisher