Apocryphal

Apocryphal, Anna Evas's debut poetry collection, relishes both the grotesque and the marvelous. Grounding the book are twenty-one remarkable cantos about two orphans. They recount the disabling heartbreak of a young girl who witnesses her sister's abuse. If both are to be saved, she must renounce her fascination with the chthonic cast of their inscrutable foe. “Peering through the fiery murk,” we read, “I braced for chimeras with horns, tails, pincers, // for green mermaids with belted knives … //. They'd have my head / if I hunted, blamed, but never saved."

Like random blooms in snow, wildflower poems clustered throughout the book induce mystical calm, transforming the poet's sadness into vivifying moods. Apocryphal also includes glimpses of a rich prayer life. In one set of meditations, various fruits function as wisdom teachers. Elsewhere, love is likened to a sacrament. This time we read: “Lunch by the white weigela / means the milk's terroir / will change from kitchen / to dairy and fermented grass. // Breaking bread with you means / rainfall rising in the grape.”

Evas's fantastical way of seeing things fuels her poetic imagination. Her themes of innocence and guilt, compassion and survival, are both universal and timeless, yet in her lyrics they wear fresh and inimitable faces: at times ghostly, always immediate, haunted, yet holding fast to life.