Winner of the 2015 Award for Best Poetry Book — THE CONSOLATIONS by John W. Evans

The winner of the 2015 Peace Corps Writers Best Poetry Book is

THE CONSOLATIONS

by John W. Evans (Bangladesh 1999–2001)

John Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant, their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When John finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear.

In the quieter, daily emotions that continue after the formal occasions for mourning are over, and in the six years that follow Katie’s death, the poems of The Consolations articulate the dislocations and disruptions of grief in a continuing life. It looks to both past and future to make sense in the margins of a senseless and brutal act.

The Consolations is a broad investigation of the terror, uncertainty, hesitation, and eagerness by which Evans chooses, in stops and starts, to live and love again, alternating hope and resignation, grief and withstanding.

Congratulations, John!

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The Consolations
by John W. Evans (Bangladesh 1999–2001)
Trio House Press
March 2014
96 pages
$16.00 (paperback)