the tides unbroken. the hidden rocks knowing nothing of battlements. the mind its own white room washed by a confluent prayer...
"To enter into Dear Excavator," says American Book Award winner Ed Bok Lee, "is to wade into an epic river-part sour dream mash, part metaphysical disquisition, part tinker's time machine, all lifeline to the jugular sublime austral light in the tradition of William Christenberry, James Agee, Whitman, and Chagall." This debut full-length collection from prose-poet Evan D. Williams comprises two dozen pieces selected from literary journals-including Borderlands and The Mud Season Review-and a further two dozen pieces that appear here for the first time. The volume is divided into seven abstractly thematic parts-starting with Maps of the World in Its Becoming and concluding with The Crocodiles Who Look Back Into an Abyss of Time-which are introduced with striking ink drawings by Southwestern outsider artist JC McCarthy. "Somewhere in the middle of this singularly post-Gothic landscape," Lee continues, "you'll awaken to find yourself soaring through an Inner Americana exhumed back to miraculous life by the sheer forces of love and lyricism."
Evan D. Williams investigates the quandaries of thenuminous and carnal self in a range of documentalforms. His writing has appeared in over fortypublications, including Borderlands, Antennae, Africanah, Mud Season Review, The Tattler, TheMartian Chronicles, and The Ovid Gazette. Hecollaborated with Jose Perez Beduya on the photochapbookPanoramas [published by Praxis in Ikeja, Nigeria] and edited the poetry and art anthologyDeliver Me. He has also created several uniqueartist's books with textual elements, including OR /WE [in the collection of the Brooklyn Art Library], Do the Needful [SVA Library] and EverythingMaterial [Ruskin Library at Oxford University]. DearExcavator is his first full-length collection. Williamslives with his wife and cats in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where he is at work on a newcollection, Not All the Leopards Are Metaphors.
JC McCarthy is an untrained artist whose hometownis El Paso, Texas. In 1990, she moved into a smallbrick building, formerly a brothel, on the edge of theU.S.-Mexico border where she worked in honor ofthe migrants who trekked through the ChihuahuanDesert and hid from la migra in unlocked cars, inmemory of the predawn screeching of brakes on atrain about to be robbed, and in dreams of desertstones whose lines and colors resembled the petrifiedorgans of some ancient creature. She currently livesand works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
