Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars

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

Reviews + Press

"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