William Evans is an author, speaker, performer, and instructor known for founding the Writing Wrongs Poetry Slam and co-founding the popular website Black Nerd Problems. He has been a national finalist in multiple poetry slam competitions and was the recipient of both the 2016 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant and the 2018 Spirit of Columbus Foundation Grant. The Callaloo and Watering Hole fellow is the author of three poetry collections and currently lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio. He is an MFA candidate at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia. (from the publisher)

I very much enjoyed this collection from Evan —intimate, often domestic, beautifully expressed. Here is a relatively short poem as illustration….

GOOD STORM

A good thunderstorm
can still knock some sense
into the night, still pull
the wind from dreams
you didn’t plan on re-
living, still send a child
from her bed as if it
were a hum
under her skin, still carve
enough space between
her mother and I to make
a house a home, still
find a lake of ageless
water under our covers
where she is still the age
she first found this quiet,
and aren’t we just waiting
on the sun to summon
the next shift or thunder
to stop? Whichever
sacrifice comes first. ( )