To read Bill Evans’s poems is to take a grand tour of the universe led by William Blake and Federico Fellini, with Cole Porter dipping in and out of the excursion. These poems combine the oracular and the vernacular, the mantic with the quotidian, and call upon a cast of characters both ancient and modern, taking us on a journey designed by a jester-prophet. Evans is a poet of immense learning who hasn’t abandoned the sense of joy and discovery. This is a book of cosmic vision related through a grain of sand, and we are carried along by the sacred and the profane. This is what we read when we want to know what it looks like, what it feels like, to be alive.

                             --Joanna Sit   author of In Thailand with the Apostles and Track Works

 

Danger, immediacy, style. You’ll want to be riding shotgun with Bill Evans as he races across the Badlands of trash talk and info-phrasing, popping off one-liners, while also evoking the canon. Riddled with lyric lace, studded with revolutionary flair, and bound together by a desperate but cool persona — these poems celebrate a unique wedding of the written and spoken. Bill puts the verse in conversation, channeling the airwaves of our era to fashion archetypal meanings.

                                                     --Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Author of Party Everywhere