The Fight Journal

I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s “From An Old House in America” was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s “The Love Story of the Century” was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.

The Fight Journal is a heartsick elegy for a failed marriage. Written in couplets that mirror the back-and-forth of two parties alternately warring with each other and struggling to hold a family together, Evans explores the depths of longing, bitterness, resignation, and hope that humanize the struggle to live and parent during and after divorce. As much a story of resolve as it is vulnerability, The Fight Journal is a bittersweet account of the complexities of connection, the power of sympathy, and the many forms that love takes in lives that continue.