Evan Nicholls, Easy Tiger

 

EASY TIGER

The tiger makes it all so easy, the way it sweeps the woman’s house, packs a satsuma for her snack, accounts for the taxes. The way it ambushes need. How it steps the ache out of her back after work, shifting like a moon man or a dressage horse. This tiger is better people than most, the woman thinks. Stil, it is shit at being a tiger. The way it obeys all rules of the IRS.

The latest from Charlottesville, Virginia poet and artist Evan Nicholls, following his prose poem and full-colour visual debut, Holy Smokes: Poems + Collages (Syracuse NY/Exeter NH: Ghost City Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], is the small yet hefty volume Easy Tiger (Future Tense Books, 2025). Easy Tiger offers a quintet suite of surreal prose poems with occasional full-colour collage, all of which appear structured in similar ways, one sentence or phrase or image set atop another into a pile, providing less of a straightforward narrative through-line than an assemblage that suggests a narrative of collisions and surrealisms through the very act of reading. “He is not a white knight or a black knight.” the poem “A REGULAR KNIGHT” begins. “He is a regular knight. / In regular armor. / With a regular sword. / He does not ride a white horse or a red dragon. / He rides a pony and is accompanied by a large ginger cat.” One might attempt to describe such pieces as short narrative fictions or prose poems, as sharp collage works or jumbles, as quirky or oddball, all imprecise offerings for what Nicholls’ poems are doing and attempting, all of the above simultaneously, deliberately riding that fine line between sense and non-sense. The single line of the poem “LAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT YOU,” for example, that reads: “You mow the lawn. You vacuum up.”

There’s been a heft of younger American poets leaning into the prose poem over the past few years, often with a surreal bent or thread, including Evan Williams [see his above/ground press title here], Shane Kowalski, Benjamin Niespodziany [see my review of his latest; see his above/ground press title here], Nate Logan [see my review of his latest; see his latest above/ground press title here], Ben Jahn [see his above/ground press title here], MC Hyland [see my review of their latest; see their above/ground press title here] and Lindsey Webb [see my review of her latest; see her above/ground press title here], as well as a whole slew of others, most of whom seem to be following an impulse or prompt by such as the late Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected poems here], although with more of a lyric bent. In his own way, Nicholls does write, as Vik Shirley offers on the back cover, with “a relentless commitment to the weird and strange,” or, as Zachary Schomburg offers, “a recklessness,” although one with such a playful, joyful sense of nuance and heart. Nicholls composes poems that can’t help but lift any dark mood, dark heart, through such joyful and surreal ridiculousness, even across the occasional dark thread. In the end, these might just be poems of hope.

CHEKHOV’S GUN

The gun had a bell for a mother. The gun’s father was a cheap crate. If the gun’s mother ever tried to go off, the crate would eat her with the entire length of his arms.