After School Session by Brett Evans

After School Session is a generous and brassy cull of correspondence from Brett Evans to Brock Downs. The poems are a direct jack into the miniamp of postcard art sent between two friends; they hit hard in an open-all-night punk rock show for the audience of one. Like the form of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, limited by the small size of a breast pocket notebook, Evans’s gumbo is cooked in the scant pot of the postcard—an ‘afterschool rest stop of the imagination / real special.’ The poems offer one slamming and damming notation after another. Down’s artful arrangement and selection should stand as a model for what one can do with our hazardous mail.

—Tom Devaney

 

Cover art by Zach Wollard. Published by Subpress and Buck Downs Books.

 

Brett Evans’s work has been featured in the anthologies The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, Another South:Experimental Writing in the South, and Poets for Living Waters. It also appears in the biography Ernie K-Doe: the R&B Emperor of New Orleans. He is a regular contributor to One Fell Swoop, Lungfull!, and unarmed magazines. Other books of the author include Slosh Models, Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), and After School Session , as well as the chapbooks Ways to Use Lance and Pisa Can. A member of the bands Skin Verb and Splinter Group, he lives on the lee of the Bayou St. John levee in New Orleans, LA.