“The poems in Christine Gosnay’s first book, Even Years, speak with a voice that animates and astonishes us as they delineate and explore, trace and explode, the ‘order of shapes in the light’—the order of words, of moments in a life, of shifts in perspective between the ‘cleave and / Cleave’ of language. In these piercing and evocative poems we see, as in the poems of Stevens and Dickinson, ‘The back of the eye / where it has been struck by all things’ (‘N-gram’).

“Surprising and moving, Gosnay’s work shows us what the ‘clean blue sleeve’ of language can do, and we are transformed and held by this book the way the speaker in the final poem is compelled by a ‘photograph of rose baskets in Morocco’: ‘Nothing on earth could keep me from pressing it to my face.’”

—Angie Estes, author of Enchantée and winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award