Even Years, first book of poetry. Available from Kent State University Press, August 2017
Winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Angie Estes
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 a
nd 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.”
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, Contest Judge, winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
If you seek poetry that takes pleasure in the world, here it is in bounty: ‘the mind likes to see the broadening of what was slim.’ Christine Gosnay spots the small-faced daisy among the grass, the dream before it vanishes. Her poems glow against the dark, bright stars constellating a heaven of her own making. Do sink into these pages and be charmed.
— D.A. Powell
Reviews
Shane McCrae, in On the Seawall: Eight Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Christine Gosnay 