“There is no end to this desert / or the playfulness of blackbirds” reads the opening two lines of Evans’ extraordinary new collection, a fitting start for a book of poems that simultaneously mourns a past that can never be recovered and also finds regeneration and renewal in the act of creation. This image reveals one the book’s central conceits: a quest for meaning in a dead and dying world, a journey at once playful and profound.

For Evans, the act of writing is its own cenotaph, a marker that reminds us of what's lost while inspiring us with its careful artistic craftsmanship. ―Jeff Newberry, author of How to Talk About the DeadandCross CountryTwo worlds inhabit Justin Evans’ Cenotaph, ‘one of flesh and one of bone.

’ When I think of an empty tomb I think of darkness, yet Cenotaph is full of light. In this elegiac, evocative collection the Great Basin Desert is where the light dazzles—in the mornings where Evans finds hope in the resolve of each new day, and at dusk with its call for prayer.

Evans sits with his dead in a landscape full of life, ‘There is breath here, and breeze / that carries our song across the land. ’ He resists the heaviness of the past, and reveals in vivid, lyrical language ‘not everything / is lost’ that the dead and the living remain friends.

Justin Evans’ Cenotaph is a powerful psalm for those of us present and for those who have passed on. —Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Fixed Star.