Poetry/Hybrid Memoir; “A visionary evocation of Appalachian life and labor.” Available from Garden-Door Press and Asterism Books. 

Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars

"A remarkable debut collection written from the intimate spaces left to us within the immortal connections between land, industry, and fate. Evan Gray's poems are a guide to interior Appalachia in all of its textures and how to bear its unceasing afterlife." - Elizabeth Catte, author of Pure America and What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

“In Evan Gray’s Thickets, money grows on trees in the sense of ‘Springleaf Financial ads’ getting ‘strung up on pines’—it grows like disease and the hands of workers get rough and the lungs of the miners fail. It’s gutting to read a book this alert to the lethal machine of industry, to death itself. But I get his eerie hope, too, from the poems. Another kind of death, an ‘offering of decay’ that’s ‘convinced … of magic.’ A salamander’s tail growing from where it was ripped off. This book of damnation lingers blessedly in my sensorium.” - Aditi Machado, author of Emporium and Some Beheadings

”We tell this funny little joke about life: everyone who dies also goes to work.’ Evan Gray’s Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars is suffused with such dark humor. Like fellow North Carolinian Jonathan Williams, Gray has a trained ear, sensitive to the choruses of contemporary Appalachia: framed high school baseball jerseys, gas station scratch-offs, scores of rainbow trout in the river, empty factories, aching hands. Thickets assembles from such fragments a lament for a geography and a people neglected, measuring its rage against acts of perception so precise they border on redemptive. What does it mean to make something amid such ruin, on land far older than you? A luminous book, one that cuts through thistle and down to the marrow to find its music.” - Michael Martin Shea, editor of Best American Experimental Writing

Blindspot (The Rest

Chapbook, Garden-Door Press; OUT OF PRINT

Reviews + Press

“Evan Gray’s Blindspot (the Rest moves with the assurance and conviction of its locality. Chisled sonic landscapes (“gas station scratch offs”) reveal a fine ear for the deep intoxicating rhythms of Appalachia, joyful and woeful. Gray’s poems attend a world perforated by the tenderness of luminous details: “the sun hum of diesel trucks / matte black against the fender,” “a hill reflected in snowmelt / leaks in the door” – place and the resonate history of place becoming, in all of its occult and transformative projections: “jake brakes vibrate through my bones…my bones to / become / unknown animal.” Nathan Hauke, author of Indian Summer Recycling 

“There is an exactness in Evan Gray’s pared down thinking in this dunning debut chapbook from a formidable emerging voice, and a constant questioning of “did I get it right” even in all the wrong precision. Like Creely, from whom we have an epigraph, we find a patient poking around outside the body and our whole worlds change where a line is broken off and where it starts up again. And like so of Creeley, these are not love poems and yet they are always about love and true story you: your people, your land, what you see and what you know.” Shelly Talyor, author of Black-Eyed Heifer

“Evan Gray’s Blindspot (The Rest is a truly remarkable debut. In the idm of William Carlos Williams and Jonathan Williams, Gray describes, with precision and sensitivity, the devastating toll economic imperatives had on the citizens and environment in and around his hometown of Jefferson, North Carolina. He is a poet of the local–only, in this case, the local flora and fauna are inextriable from suicides, tax collectors, deteriorating homes, and courthouse visits. Gray listens for and transcribes “the sounds / dying” in the blindspots that haunt us.” Alessandro Porco, editor of The Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry

Body Birth