We Inherit What the Fires Left

Starred review from February 17, 2020
Evans (Still Can’t Do My Daughter’s Hair) poignantly addresses in this vulnerable collection his experience raising his daughter in the suburbs while reckoning with the memory of his own father and childhood. In three titled sections—“Grass Growing Wild Beneath Us,” “Trespass,” and “Aging Out of Someone Else’s Dream”—Evans recounts the mundane moments of pride and learning that come with fatherhood, as well as the larger systemic threats and legacies of violence that underlie his experience as a black American. In “Waves,” his daughter asks a question about the ocean, which brings to mind the slaves forced to cross the Atlantic. The poem closes with acknowledging another threat: “On the ride home, after I have/ quieted the bark, an officer/ pulls us to the side of the road/ and asks me whose car I am driving/ my family home in.” In “Pledge to Raising a Black Girl,” he asks, “How do you know what you have a taste for// if you’ve been told never to show your teeth?... The elders want us to raise// girls with a song in their heart, but we only respect/ the classics if they respected us, which is why// if you ask me how I’m doing, I say still breathing.” These poems offer sensitive portraits of race and fatherhood and richly explore the past while providing hope for the future.

March 1, 2020
Evans knows what it is to love desperately, to feel in every joy its potential absence. This passionate, jarring, and often ruefully funny collection begins with the frustration, confusion, and awe of fatherhood. But the poems are specifically about Black fatherhood and the collision of the sweet discomfort of a preschooler hogging the warm spot between her parents in their bed with the habitual fear of a random traffic stop leading to that father never coming home. The intensity of this contrast is enhanced by Evans' stylistic and formal variety. Some poems look like spoken word written down, others align themselves in stanzas or stutter across the page, forcing the reader to breathe with the voices in the poems. Then toward the end of the book, a crown of four sonnets springs up like the garden Evans talks about in several poems. The imagery constantly surprises, as when a toddler is described as running with her mother "like a second hand / catching up to the hour." This is a powerful, transformative book.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)