purl by Michele Evans

 

purl, the remarkable debut by Michele Evans, accomplishes so much of what I admire in contemporary poetry. Revisiting, subverting, and modernizing mythological characters, from aeolia to sirenia, from arachnia to xenia, Evans makes their stories ours, and our stories theirs. The poems interrogate family, violence, love, leaving the reader moved, with “eyes unveiled.” Fierce, feminist, experimentally formal (the “diademia” sonnet crown is a tour de force), these poems are carefully crafted (stitch, purl) yet absolutely urgent, “swirls moving forcefully across the page.”

–Moira Egan

 

In purl, Michele Evans bends Greek mythology into a vessel to deftly capture the rage, the love, and the memory of generations of Black American women longing to be heard. This debut collection marks the emergence of a long-simmering poet ready to shake the world–and anything unrooted–with her elegies.

–Brooke C. Obie, award-winning author of Book of Addis: Cradled Embers 

 

With poems that take their titles from Greek mythology references, Michele Evans‘s purl layers the reader in a world at once unique and at the same time achingly familiar.  Evans’s poems weave threads of intimacy, anguish, loss, and more in a work that ranges in form and voice. And it’s these voices that become a chorus, singing their human songs in this crowning debut.

–Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union and Haint

 

These virtuosic poems swirl and sing. Michele Evans‘s generous debut collection knits together Greek mythology with contemporary reflections that feel both prescient and deft. As Evans reflects, i recast their sorrows in/stanzas, statues, and stones/replacing my reality/with illusions. Her work is a weaving and reimagination of Greek mythology that is compelling and necessary.

–Saida Agostini, author of let the dead in