In her new book, States of Grace, Anna M. Evans shows how language—specifically the language of poetry—sews up the chasms between countries, between people, between lifetimes. This book’s speaker is a lover, a mother, a confidante, a teacher, a driver of both Jersey turnpikes and English country roads. Evans’s verse is deft yet colloquial. She is able to spin tales in a villanelle, give us full sagas in a sonnet sequence. This book is an enlightening journey, and I’m glad to go along wherever Anna M. Evans leads.
— Allison Joseph, author of Dwelling and Lexicon
From the soul-crushing claustrophobia of industrial English Midland towns to the uncanny beauty of open spaces “where old oaks gloried over clearings worthy of gods,” to present-day Garden State suburbia with its “poor relation of the fields and meadows,” Evans deliberates on the complex questions of belonging and identity. Though she speaks of “leaving and not looking back,” the homeland’s power remains magnetic. Elegiac, witty, and unsparing, States of Grace shines in its examination of romantic love, parenthood, and friendship’s healing power.
— Jane Satterfield, author of The Badass Brontës and Apocalypse Mix
States of Grace charts the boundaries that divide us, some of them as arbitrary as lines on a map, others as immense as oceans. Exploring her own journey from England to New Jersey, Anna M. Evans asks what it means to call a place home, and the impact the accidents of our births have on who we are and how we see the world. Many talk of the need to bridge our partisan political divides, but few have genuinely tried to do it, let alone with the formal grace of Anna’s flawless meter and rhyme. This is a book to share with distant friends and family, and one that just might bring us all closer together.
— Timothy Green, editor of Rattle
