Evidences

the long version

Chosen and with an Introduction by Jorie Graham, *Evidences* is the winner of the sixth annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. In poems that are by turns lyrical, disjunctive, autobiographical, and political, Evidences sifts through residues of landscape and history. The physicality of the language and the invocation of the world of places and things form a meditative process, surveying the conditions of perception and memory, history and grace. **from "The Sand Runs Through"** *Coming out of the forest, at the edge of the clearing, Then at your door bearing a suitcase of vials, You opened your window to owls Flying from pines, the sea a maze of color, Remembering, then, walking in the desert You whispered the stars too Must be homeless, the desert the place of His absence, that was the gift Or that which was taken away, You whispered, in the sand the marks of bodies Stretched out among twisted wood, As examples, lost, as warnings, figures of evidence.*