{"product_id":"9781936970100","title":"A Penance","description":"\u003cbr\u003ePoetry. \"There is an uneasy tenderness to C. J. 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\u003cp\u003e\"The elegantly armored, brutally beautiful poems that make up A PENANCE call to mind Wallace Stevens's description of imaginative nobility as 'a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.' They present a psyche no less troubled by the ruthlessness of reality than by its own strong appetite for escapism—the work of a mind that thinks 'it's striking \/ how much dark there is \/\/ in this world that houses \/ diamonds and rivers' even as it questions its own 'wish for a pillowed world \/\/ where we slip into \/ each others' arms and then let fall.' That Evans is able to convert such turmoil into complex, sonically rich, wide-awake and insightful poems is a testament not only to his artistry as a poet (it is immense) but also, ultimately, to an almost miraculous sense of hope.\"—Timothy Donnelly\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"New Issues Poetry \u0026 Prose","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47040405668080,"sku":"9781936970100","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781936970100_p0.jpg?v=1763660432","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781936970100","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}