Green

Suzannah Evans’ new pamphlet introduces us to Green, half human, half angry nature spirit. Green serves as a stunt double for our own rage and complicity in nature’s destruction, showing us nature’s delights so we may mourn their loss more deeply.

‘Green is a contemporary secular canticle, where matter and living beings are in mischievous, polyphonic dialogue. Channelled through this beyond-human figure, it presents a decentred ecology where Green isn’t rooting for anyone – but where we must find a way to befriend him, without turning him into a man. Earth is lively and re-enchanted, in Green’s contemporary and accessible animism. We are invited to accept the majesty of llama memes alongside the death drop of species extinction. Fuck you, Green says to the wasps, stinging him all over, I still love you. A gentle, passionate, good-natured plea, for even the ickiest creatures to be named in Green’s – and humanity’s – affections.’

Caleb Parkin

‘In this delicious mini-biography of the mythic figure, Suzannah Evans conjures up a Green Man – modishly monikered ‘Green’ – who is witness, listener, accountant, cheerleader, of all and every aspect of nature. An inveterate listicle maker, he can’t help but nag us until our attention is drawn back inexorably to the wonder of the world; it’s nightmares too. Whether he is supervising extinctions, lavender farming, or picking up plastic litter on the beach, Green is unabashedly a fun, wry and playful personality to spend some time with.’

Rishi Dastidar

27th June 2024 | Paperback: 978-1-913268-62-6 | ePub: 978-1-913268-63-3

Part of Little Betty 2024, curated by Anja Konig and Gboyega Odubanjo.
In memory of Gboyega, with love.

Non Canon/ Suzannah Evans split EP

I toured with long-time friend and music wizard Non Canon in April 2023. We made this split EP especially for the tour.

It has original recordings from both of us along with some collaborations and reimagining of each others’ work. It will be available as a download code hand-written into a limited edition notepad. Copies are available via Bandcamp at the link above .

Space Baby, Nine Arches Press, June 2022

Cover artwork by Ayham Jabr

Space Baby, the second collection by Suzannah Evans, asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them; how do we look to the future on a planet that’s burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?

In this dystopian, searching book, Evans skilfully mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, and serious themes. Here, we encounter artificial intelligence and robots that will ‘cuddle you to sleep’, the melting permafrost and all the surprises it reveals, as well as the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.

Praise for Space Baby:

“Reading Suzannah Evans is like scuba diving in a twilight coral reef with an underwater fluorescence torch strapped to your head. It’s immersive and dangerous and you’re not quite the same once you resurface.” – Caroline Bird

“I often find myself racing to the ends of things” writes Suzannah Evans in one poem – in this dazzling and inventive collection, we get to glimpse all we stand to lose in the impending climate catastrophe as well as what might be hovering just beyond ourselves, out of reach, in deep space” – Andrew McMillan

“Only Suzannah Evans can bring together extinct pigeons, duvet days and the whole hulking universe to reflect the absurdity of our contemporary moment. At once companionable and delusion-shattering, Space Baby is a bold and brilliant follow-up to Near Future.” – Isabel Galleymore  

Buy from Nine Arches Press (£9.99 paperback)

Read about the writing of this collection on the Nine Arches Press blog

Near Future (published November 2018) 

Buy from me via Paypal link (£12 inc postage) 

Buy from Nine Arches Press (£9.99)

Read a blog post and a poem from the book on the Nine Arches Press blog 

Read three poems from the collection at And Other Poems

‘For sci-fi fans, Suzannah Evans’s Near Future is essential reading. There are plug-in cities and a robotic blackbird (“his electric beak a bright nib”), but she also sees futuristic weirdness in the everyday: “Of course they dream of freedom,” begins her ode to London’s sewer-bound fatbergs.’

 – Tristram Fane-Saunders, The Telegraph

‘Suzannah Evans’s poems offer us a catalogue of disasters and darknesses, imagining asteroid collisions, call centres at the end of the world, a museum of different types of dark, a school play set in a motel run by the devil. Against this, the author sets up an unforgettable humour and a range of everyday objects – alcopops, a nylon carpet, a tin of beans in tomato sauce – in poems which are accessible, entertaining and often deeply moving. Global catastrophe becomes an opportunity to focus powerfully on personal relationships; imagined cities give us the real city anew. Writers like Charles Simic and Matthew Sweeney seem like good reference points for this writing, but there is a spirit and a personality in the work of this exciting new writer which is all her own.’

 – Jonathan Edwards 

‘In an anxious, paranoid world, we need poems like these more than ever. Near Future is a witty and inventive debut collection, offering wry hope as well as a dystopian vision of the future. Suzannah Evans’ writing is subtle and precise, shaped by a searching intellect.’ 

– Helen Mort

‘The world could do with poems that make us laugh and think at the same time. Here’s a book full of them – wry, charming, full of love for the world and its oddities.’ 

– Jo Bell

Confusion Species, Smith|Doorstop Books, 2012

You can buy a copy of the pamphlet at my Paypal page (£5 + £1 postage). Don’t forget to email me your address so I can post it!

‘Tough/tender lyric poems in which the language crackles with life whether addressing the urban or the rural and possessed of a truly exciting inventiveness.’ — Carol Ann Duffy

‘Confusion Species by [another] Poetry Business winner, Suzannah Evans, creates a world of slippage and double exposure in which familiar outlines are subtly unpicked to allow the conflicting categories of everyday life to overlap: “A chestnut snorts, stamps / metalled hooves in the bus shelter / boards the 91 after a man / with a flat cap and a pale face”. The faint uneasiness of these displacements makes the idea of home even more attractive although, Evans shows, the best place to find this is in our imagination,  “a place our feet had never touched”.’ — The TLS

‘Her eye wanders found subjects (a vandalised swimming pool, graffiti on a bridge, a group of grazing horses) but she pushes out from these accidental subjects imaginatively, moving from the descriptive to the inventive. Sometimes this leads her to surrealism … Sometimes she finds dark terrain … Sometimes she simply ends at a place she didn’t know she was going to when she began: ‘a place our feet had never touched.’ (‘Leeds International Swimming Pool’).’ — Noel Williams, Orbis

My pamphlet was one of the winners of the 2011 Poetry Business Competition and can be purchased  from Smith/ Doorstop here .

Antiphon Poetry interviewed me about winning the competition and you can read it here.