Imagine Sisyphus Happy

R. G. Evans explores with rare skill poems that remind us how at times (even briefly), we have all been aware of what it was like to be Sisyphus. I can't think of another poet so unflinchingly candid in facing our darkest demons with a wild combination of irreverent existentialism fused with fierce tenderness, especially in his father poems His range is vast -from mythology to family poems. Yet, astonishingly, these are poems that transcend weathered emotional brutality and are poems that celebrate survival as in "Lucky" If you want to feel lucky, take a look at a stone. If your name isn't carved into it, it's your lucky day.

Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover and editor of Lips

"We are always between angels," says R. G. Evans in his wondrous new collection, Imagine Sisyphus Happy. These poems look back on personal history, on life and loss, on triumphs and failures-the secret language of the blood. Evans walks to the edge and crosses over, giving us a glimpse of the extraordinary in the ordinary: elegy flowers, the smell of fresh-cut hay, a neighborhood 7-11, the steadiness of animals, cypress trees, and stars. Evans "is trembling there at the summit just before the rock rolls down," and we want to be right there with him, flesh to stone.

January O'Neil, author of Rewilding

Imagine Sisyphus Happy is a blues set of middle age reckoning. In poems of insight, wit, regret, and humor, R. G. Evans has created a meta-pause of toughened lyrics that consider how a man has lived. Beginning with a solo speaker, the voice expands into a chorus of multitudes. With startling imagery and unerring tonal shifts, the poems slide into minor keys of lament, rueful truth, keen-edged question and self-critique, chord changes that lay bare the good griefs and the bitter, the doubts and small mercies that shape the lives of men and their gods.

J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair