American Mules by Martina Evans is a glorious collection of poems, two books within one, an astonishment of riches. How she melds narrative audacity with sharp insight and juicy lyricism is so memorable. It’s a book that gets into your heart. These poems echo and shimmer. I’ll be looking forward to returning to this wonderful volume at a slower summertime pace. — Joseph O’Connor
Martina Evans’s American Mules, a scintillating poetry collection from a unique, deeply observant, beautifully compassionate consciousness which creates a fully realised world of its own. — Catriona Crowe
‘Martina Evans keeps the reader in close and constant orbit…It gave me immense pleasure to read an Irish poet whose syntax and diction estranged (in the best way) the American English poetry I read all the time, and offered such musical and witty reward.’ Megan Fernandes
Striking powers of social observation… every single adjective attentively exact… Without straining for effect, she mixes pity with horror – and a repeated theme of fallibility. Evans’s great gift, though, is for storytelling combined with a music that says to the reader or listener, these things are connected – here’s how.
Martina Evans is that rarest of rara avis, a poet whose work is at once serious and authentically enjoyable. Evans is working now with more brio and fearlessness than ever before. American Mules is a book of splendours and will surely count among her very best.
Martina Evans’ poems are compressed stories, if not entire novels, in all but their word counts… she is the least abstract, least generalising of poets.
Michael Glover, The Tablet
