New Poems

"In New Poems, Evan Thomas' attention traverses a faultline in the ordinary world's uncertainty, where the lyric is not a vessel for expression so much as the mode of sustained contact.

These poems are shaped by a persistent concern with orientation: how one knows where one stands when place is more complex than exteriority and the self is never fully contained within the boundaries it assumes. The Midwest is present both as setting and as an abiding accumulation of horizontality and time-weathered distance, a space which is at once familiar, concrete, and fundamentally destabilized.

Formally, Thomas moves in proximity to the New American lyric tradition, with lines marked by compression and clarity under tension. His is an elemental syntax of careful instability, in which perception and interiority are repeatedly revised in the acts of being thought or spoken. Throughout this collection, he urges us to reckon with what really matters: the things we owe ourselves and our people - not resolutions but responsiveness." -Alex Cobb, May 2026