Justin Evans is a poet and teacher, currently living in the rural desert of Northeastern Nevada. He is the author of four chapbooks of poetry and five full length collections of poetry, the most recent being Cross Country, a collaboration of epistolary poems with Jeff Newberry. Justin was born in Provo, Utah in 1969, and raised from the age of eight by his grandparents in Springville, Utah. A year after graduating high school in 1987, Justin joined the army, serving from 1988-1992. A communications specialist, he eventually served in Texas, Germany, Operation Desert Storm, and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina. After the army Justin returned to Utah where he attended Utah Valley State College, and then Southern Utah University. Justin has an Associate of Arts degree in Humanities, and a Bachelor of Science in History, with a minor in English Education. He also holds a Master’s degree in Literacy Studies from The University of Nevada, Reno. After one semester at UVSC as an adjunct writing instructor, Justin took a job teaching high school in rural Nevada, where he has taught for the past twenty years. Justin’s poetry has appeared in dozens of literary journals, most recently in Clover: A Literary Rag, Sugar House Review, The Laurel Review, diode, and Xavier Review. Thematically, many of Justin’s poems and books center on the landscape of Springville, Utah, and the surrounding countryside. His first chapbook, Four Way Stop, was a winner of the 2004 Main-Travelled Roads Chapbook contest. He has received an honorable mention from the Nevada Arts Council as part of the Artist Grants program for his poetry, and additional grants from the Nevada Arts Council for the publication of his third full length collection of poems, Sailing This Nameless Ship, in 2014, as well as grant money in order to attend writing workshops. His poetry has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and also once for the Best of the Net. For six years he was the editor of the online journal, Hobble Creek Review.
Works
Spring Fire
Spring Fire
That spring morning
the cold was a February rock
pulled from our garden
held tight against my face.
The sky still a shallow
waking breath of day,
rising over the dark shoulders
of Three Sisters Mountain.
The night before, a fire raged
on West Mountain,
sweeping away the kindness
of a mild winter
greeting the sun with a crooked smile.
Poem for West Mountain on the First Warm Evening of the Year
Poem for West Mountain on the
First Warm Evening of the Year
Sliver of yellow moon
fading fast
in the still wet blue
wash of night
hanging like a pendulum
in mid swing
from the constant
mirror of Venus
Singing Back the River
Singing Back the River
1.
Sky darkened into threat
as night continued to edge itself
beneath the sun’s rock solid faith.
Rain, big as quarter dollars, fell on Springville.
Its glassy iridescence bombarded the earth.
Dust was stifled.
With farmers
it’s either too much rain or not enough.
2.
That night the river broke behind Vera Diamond’s house.
I was fourteen.
The town gathered like a chorus
to sing the flood waters back, keep the world
from escaping.
I ran barefoot all the way to the river bank
only to be sent back for my shoes.
When I returned to be lowered into the river
with sandbags to shore up the rupture
a rope was tied to my belt in case I slipped.
Black water closed around my body.
Cold swallowed me into the river’s current.
3.
Resting in a truck, I spoke my poems
to a girl who was older than me.
She drew me in like a warm breath.
Clouds tore themselves apart,
exposing the stars— helpless watchers.
We wondered where next we would meet
in the closed eye of night to sing back the river
our urge to speak replaced
by the sound of departure
working its truth into our wet bones.
Eastern Pretty Skies
Eastern Pretty Skies
When morning breaks over the Wasatch Rockies
sky turns pale blue, fills the valley with a light
more subtle than the brashness of Midwestern prairies.
As the sun quietly walks through day’s early hours
shadows recede in a complex dance, orchestrated to
reinforce the balance struck between heaven and earth.
—for David Lee
Bibliography
Chapbooks
- Four Way Stop, Main-Traveled Roads, 2005.
- Gathering up the Scattered Leaves, Foothill Publishing, 2006.
- Working in the Bird House, Foothills Publishing, 2008.
- Friday in the Republic of Me, Foothills Publishing, 2012.
Full Length Collections
- Town for the Trees, Foothills Publishing, 2011.
- Hobble Creek Almanac, Aldrich Press, 2013.
- Sailing This Nameless Ship, BlazeVOX, 2014.
- Lake of Fire: Poems from the Great Basin Desert of Nevada, Aldrich Press, 2015.
- Cross Country, with Jeff Newberry, WordTech Editions, 2019.
