PRAISE FOR HOLY SMOKES

"What a tonic. From the sad sweep of the opening poem, to startling collages, to rejection letters from hell, Holy Smokes is on fire."

— Sarah J. Sloat, author of Hotel Almighty

"Evan Nicholls has skillfully opened the barn door and set free the rat terriers and the horses and the pumas and the goats. You might find 'a necklace of foxes' lodged in your throat. In his debut chapbook, we see prose poems and collages and telegrams and lists and letters from hell. Vikings and cowboys, snow peaches and beans. Holy Smokes is right: this collection is an 'auction talk' whirlwind, a multimedia parade of nature and beast and beating heart. Hopeful odes to a vaudevillian Americana. 'Yet / below this bridge,' Nicholls insists, 'a silhouette keeps fire.'"

— Ben Niespodziany

"Evan Nicholls’ Holy Smokes is resonant with a hyperbolic folksiness you can see coming from a mile away after reading the title, cornpone and free wheelin’. But then these little box-fictions are also full of sparks amidst dry tinder, like a bagful of dissimilar matches all shook up & ready to burn... My favorite part of the book might be the way the collages interpose themselves halfway through, presenting an array of sudden elsewheres populated with dual presences, matter animated with consciousness floating across very obviously repurposed landscapes. Then I’m back inside the black comedy of the poems and by the end all I know is I never want to leave this weird little universe."

— David Dodd Lee