Homemade Traps for New World Brians

"These are poems for our new millennium. Evan Willner explores the state, or rather the states, we are in, with fifty poems of remarkable linguistic power. These little 'traps' or contraptions of 145 syllables each, take up big issues of our time--the challenge of seeing the self from the angle of the cell; the mechanization of bodies and minds; the violence that accompanies and defeats our procreative urge--and turns them into units of poetic energy. Enjambments, apostrophes, interrogatives pull us in. Words squeeze, ooze, protrude and collide like the mind-body entities, those brains and brain-emissions they describe. The poems wreak havoc on everyday language and associations in order to regenerate them. And if they shock us and amuse us by turns, they always please" – Bonnie Costello.

"Evan Willner reinvisions fifty states as fifty poems that each have the flinty, hard logic and formal density of stone slabs--stele or gravestones--or of teeth. And yet, the language within these poems is palpable and mysterious and alive, the connection between words and things skew in all sorts of right ways that end up making everything seem to be wriggling and formicating on the same level of consciousness: next time you look at nature, don't be surprised if it gives you a come-hither look back. A must read for all Brians" – Brian Evenson.