Even Years

“The poems in Christine Gosnay’s first book, Even Years, speak with a voice that animates and astonishes us as they delineate and explore, trace and explode, the `order of shapes in the light’—the order of words, of moments in a life, of shifts in perspective between the `cleave and / Cleave’ of language. In these piercing and evocative poems we see, as in the poems of Stevens and Dickinson, `The back of the eye / where it has been struck by all things’ (`N-gram’). ""Surprising and moving, Gosnay’s work shows us what the `clean blue sleeve’ of language can do, and we are transformed and held by this book the way the speaker in the final poem is compelled by a `photograph of rose baskets in Morocco’: `Nothing on earth could keep me from pressing it to my face.’” — Angie Estes, author of Enchantée and winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.