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.

Evan Nicholls, Holy Smokes: Poems + Collages

 

Cowpokes

Help! We have been lassoed into a J.J. Cale song & cannot find our way out. No matter how many cattle we push, creeks we cross. Every morning, we wake up like the snow on the mountain. Which is to say, under a bright trance. Somehow steady. Like your hand or the moon. Our hearts go moo. This part of the trail—you can call it fate or a preposition. The cruel square dance, a corner a season. Rope. It’s where we’re always at.

Virginia poet and artist Evan Nicholls’ debut is Holy Smokes: Poems + Collages (Syracuse NY/Exeter NH: Ghost City Press, 2021), a collection of prose poems and full-colour collage. Given this title is softbound (not stapled) and some sixty pages, I’m uncertain how this is referred to as a “chapbook”; I would certainly call this a full-length collection. The poems sit in two sections on either side of a middle section, comprised entirely of full-colour collage works, and the counterpoint of collage prose poem to collage visual adds a curious element to the reading of both, suggesting the echoed nature of composition for both his visual and written forms. The bulk of the poems collected here are set as single-stanza prose poems, although he does also include the occasional poem with more traditional line-breaks, including points where he uses the line breaks as a way to almost disrupt the line, disrupting the cadence and the meaning. “Contrary to what the newsreels say I feel,” he writes, to open the first poem of the collection, “Wildfire,” “cold on the inside I came West to plunge / my body into the Pacific They call me Death / Tell Rising This is not my first name My real / name was whispered to me by a paper-dry / leaf hopping & dragging like a flightless bird [.]” Otherwise, this is a collection of odd little narratives and short bursts, composed via an accumulation of sentences and phrases into folksy and surreal lyric narratives comparable to the prose bursts of writers such as Benjamin Niespodziany, Stuart Ross or Gary Barwin; set in that space between what might be considered flash fiction and prose poem, existing somewhere purely between.

There is a particular self-amused joyousness to these pieces, a confident curiosity that runs through his collection of short narratives. His poems offer a curious humour, such as “Hell Rejects Hannibal Barca (& Rules It a Suicide),” composed as a rejection memo from Hell to Hannibal (b. 247 BC), the Carthaginian general and statesman who famously took elephants over the Alps during his war with Italy during the Second Punic War of 218 BC. “We were pleased to consider your application,” the poem begins, “& to speak with you about our opening on The Board, the most exclusive circle of Hell. However, we are unable to offer you a spot at this time.” I am very much looking forward to seeing what Evan Nicholls does next.

The Dot

Our son was born with a dot above the bridge of his nose. So, naturally, he was a leopard. Our son was a firefighting dog. An i or an ! or the blue planet seen from space. As planned, all this lying worked wonders for his confidence. He grew up knowing he could be anything. He became a good husband and a good father. Our son bought his family a house. Took his kids to the grocery store. We were so proud. Till one day, at the grocery store, the dot became a sniper dot and blew his grey matter across a pallet of tangerines. We knew we had failed him when the president and the check-out girl knocked on our front door, said, You failed that boy.