The Evening Championship by Masin Persina

To be a poet is to be in a culture and apart from it at once, but also to be in the self and separate from it as well, always both insider and outsider, citizen and foreigner. Like Descartes, who in the comfort of his room set out on a great and spiritually perilous voyage of search and discovery, Masin Persina thinks and feels his way through a welter of uncertainties to seek what it means to be a self moving through the strange medium we’ve all found ourselves in—the world and all of its troubling contingencies. “He is a black speck I watch recede/into the ocean’s horizon,” Persina suggests, as he moves from poem to poem with impressive technical versatility, gazing with inquisitive wonder and ambivalence at a spider, a dying bee, his coffee mug, 21st century America, even his very own name. I highly recommend this beautiful collection.

–Geoffrey Nutter author of Giant Moth Perishes and Christopher Sunset

The odd, unique, and compelling poems in The Evening Championship consider ultra-specific, unexpected, and sometimes peripheral phenomena of contemporary life: the cleanup of a stadium after a sporting event, the head of an executed terrorist, an inventory of the possessions of a departed parent. All these things inspire meditations on loss and our roles in the complexities of human affairs. While Masin Persina‘s speakers are particularly attuned to the mutability of all things, the collection’s tone is not one of anxiety but rather of curiosity and amazement—or, as one speaker puts it: “what strange customs we arrive / into each moment.”

Christopher Brean Murray author of Black Observatory, winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize