purl
Using a mixture of poetic forms varying in subject, shape, style, and size, purl reimagines timeless myths from Homer’s Odyssey. Stitched from classical translations, verses honoring feminine forces swirl across modern epic landscapes. This poignant debut collection, inspired by the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, amplifies a chorus of the marginalized: queens and maidens, mothers and daughters, wives and mistresses, goddesses and slaves, “brimming with songs/ muffled voices rarely heard.” With each page turn, readers are invited to celebrate the resilience of women bound by those universal traumas threaded through literature and life.
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Cover Art by Harrison Evans
praise for purl
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purl, the remarkable debut by Michele Evans, accomplishes so much of what I admire in contemporary poetry. Revisiting, subverting, and modernizing mythological characters, from aeolia to sirenia, from arachnia to xenia, Evans makes their stories ours, and our stories theirs. The poems interrogate family, violence, love, leaving the reader moved, with “eyes unveiled.” Fierce, feminist, experimentally formal (the “diademia” sonnet crown is a tour de force), these poems are carefully crafted (stitch, purl) yet absolutely urgent, “swirls moving forcefully across the page.”
–Moira Egan
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In purl, Michele Evans bends Greek mythology into a vessel to deftly capture the rage, the love, and the memory of generations of Black American women longing to be heard. This debut collection marks the emergence of a long-simmering poet ready to shake the world–and anything unrooted–with her elegies.
–Brooke C. Obie, award-winning author of Book of Addis: Cradled Embers
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With poems that take their titles from Greek mythology references, Michele Evans‘s purl layers the reader in a world at once unique and at the same time achingly familiar. Evans’s poems weave threads of intimacy, anguish, loss, and more in a work that ranges in form and voice. And it’s these voices that become a chorus, singing their human songs in this crowning debut.
–Teri Ellen Cross Davis, author of a more perfect Union and Haint
more praise for purl
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These virtuosic poems swirl and sing. Michele Evans‘s generous debut collection knits together Greek mythology with contemporary reflections that feel both prescient and deft. As Evans reflects, i recast their sorrows in/stanzas, statues, and stones/replacing my reality/with illusions. Her work is a weaving and reimagination of Greek mythology that is compelling and necessary.
–Saida Agostini, author of let the dead in
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It’s a remarkable debut, with Evans transforming Greek mythology into an entirely new method of storytelling. Evans’ poems rewrite and reframe mythological women to speak to the now. Her work reads like a personal revolution on the page.
-Hannah Grieco, Washington City Paper
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In Michele Evans’ fine debut poetry collection, purl (Finishing Line Press, February 2025), the poet weaves variations on the title word. The echo with “pearl,” while possibly not intentional, becomes apparent as the reader engages with the poems’ shimmering language...the poet’s achievement in presenting these timeless stories with modern psychological insight in clear contemporary language, simple yet polished to a sheen like the pearl that the collection’s title echoes. I’d love to be able to go on quoting and talking about the many fascinating reworkings of ancient tales but I leave it to the reader to follow up and experience the power and beauty by getting her own copy and perusing it carefully. One element of the attractiveness of the volume is the cover design and two illustrations inside the book, all by the poet’s very talented son, Harrison Evans.
-Greg Luce, Washington-Unbound
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