Lives

In CJ Evans’s second collection Lives, the word “lives” appears in the first poem as a verb to express the ongoing miracle—and precarity—of earth’s existence: “As impossible as it seems // within all the ungovernable / enormity, she lives.” What it means to be alive in a world that may be ending is Evans’s main subject: to value the “implacable” interior life of one’s spouse while desiring the nonexistence of all human life in order for the earth to heal (“let this home / be the murmuring forest again”), to imagine the last earthly pleasures of one’s children—seeing a bird, for example—while envying those who will exist when human predation of the earth comes to an end, as in “Today I Wanted to Try Happiness”:

[…] I do want us to hold on until my children get to show
their children a wren, but I’m jealous of those last few who, at the start
of our unpreying after, will witness how easily the world lives without us. 

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. As the speaker says, “There’s a price I’ve exacted / to live—a shadow in which nothing else can grow— / but since I’m here I’d love.” Perhaps taking a cue from William Blake—“What the hammer? what the chain”—Evans affectingly molds and carves syntax to make tangible the contorted shape of experience at a time of impending catastrophe, as in “Still Life with Love and No Lights”:

When alleycats. When chemicals run 
stormdrains, when all the lovely balconies

are left empty. When powerlines wince 
with the burden of occupying, 

and in the blackberries dart coyotes. 
When spiderwebs complicate. And also: 

kissing. Yes. […]