States of Grace: Poems

By Anna M Evans

States of Grace, Anna M. Evans's third full-length collection, is structured in three sections that move between a British childhood and an American present-New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Wisconsin lakes-while reflecting on belonging, migration, family, teaching, motherhood, grief, and public life. The central sequence, "States of Grace," is a heroic crown of sonnets set in Wisconsin that holds a friendship between two women across an unbridgeable political divide, refusing both rupture and easy reconciliation. Elsewhere, formal pieces-villanelle, pantoum, abecedarian, ekphrasis-appear alongside conversational lyrics of roads, city, and shore. Throughout, Evans balances narrative clarity and formal craft to consider memory, identity, the ordinary, and the sacred.

PRAISE FOR STATES OF GRACE:

In her new book, States of Grace, Anna M. Evans shows how language-specifically the language of poetry-sews up the chasms between countries, between people, between lifetimes. This book's speaker is a lover, a mother, a confidante, a teacher, a driver of both Jersey turnpikes and English country roads. Evans's verse is deft yet colloquial. She is able to spin tales in a villanelle, give us full sagas in a sonnet sequence. This book is an enlightening journey, and I'm glad to go along wherever Anna M. Evans leads.

- Allison Joseph, author of Dwelling and Lexicon

From the soul-crushing claustrophobia of industrial English Midland towns to the uncanny beauty of open spaces "where old oaks gloried over clearings worthy of gods," to present-day Garden State suburbia with its "poor relation of the fields and meadows," Evans deliberates on the complex questions of belonging and identity. Though she speaks of "leaving and not looking back," the homeland's power remains magnetic. Elegiac, witty, and unsparing, States of Grace shines in its examination of romantic love, parenthood, and friendship's healing power.

- Jane Satterfield, author of The Badass Brontës and Apocalypse Mix

States of Grace charts the boundaries that divide us, some of them as arbitrary as lines on a map, others as immense as oceans. Exploring her own journey from England to New Jersey, Anna M. Evans asks what it means to call a place home, and the impact the accidents of our births have on who we are and how we see the world. Many talk of the need to bridge our partisan political divides, but few have genuinely tried to do it, let alone with the formal grace of Anna's flawless meter and rhyme. This is a book to share with distant friends and family, and one that just might bring us all closer together.

- Timothy Green, editor of Rattle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Anna M. Evans's poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County. Her books include her latest chapbooks, The Quarantina Chronicles (Barefoot Muse Press, 2020) and The Unacknowledged Legislator (Empty Chair Press, 2019), along with Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic (Able Muse Press, 2018), and her sonnet collection, Sisters & Courtesans (White Violet Press, 2014).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1773491903
• ISBN13: 9781773491905
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Able Muse Press
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"