A dunce cap on a dog. The world's largest sausage. A giraffe crippled by blocks of color. Aircraft carriers bristling with pastel light...
The enchanted prose poems and minimalist collages in Evan Nicholls' Easy Tiger combine to create a multimedia journey into reorganizing the mundane. Born out of a fascination with common sayings, turns of phrase, and the absurd, Easy Tiger is about love, family, assurance, and doubt. Featuring cats and canines, pelicans, a komodo dragon, a vampire deer, ducks in hats, a melancholy gun, pinks, blues, yellows, reds, and greens, Nicholls' dynamic collection is exceptionally fun-both easy to read and hard to swallow, lovingly mapping out a world that will have you laughing and sobbing into your chainmail sleeve.
If you need something in your backpack that's exciting and strange and innovative, put Easy Tiger by Evan Nicholls in there. It's a book that ambushes all expectations. The works in Easy Tiger freeze me, ask me to get down on my knees with the sweet wet leaves, examine every phrase and idiom and gesture and image with more curiosity and appreciation. Rather than rabbits, fire emerges from this magician's hat. So many final lines in this book leave me baffled and laughing. I'll be looking for the latest Evan Nicholls for years to come.
- Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, author of Disintegration Made Plain and Easy
Easy, tiger, language is a wild animal. It doesn't obey the rules of the IRS unless it's the internal rendezvous service. It's on fire, like an arrow in the heart, the father of a gun, a many-skinned onion that cries on every level because collages are poems and poems are collages. The world is a collage and so is Evan Nicholls' beautiful, marvellous and inventive Easy Tiger. It's our world- wondrous, strange, worrying, magic, hilarious and filled with both danger and comet light. "Amazing place this earth, the way it makes you/stay holding onto it with no hands." So hold tight, this book has all the feels of a popemobile driven by the moon.
- Gary Barwin, author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory
Easy Tiger is America's freaky dreaming! Little surreal images and wonder-filled sentences in scalpel-short poems, where everything spins and shoots in all directions. Here, there is a joyful refusal to become jaded, a relentless commitment to the weird and strange, a breeziness as response to the world's nonsense from Nicholls' candy-poem dispenser. From parlour tricks and wipeable toucans, emu knights and pinball machines, to pillow factories, triceratops and Orangina spokespersons, this is the world you enter at your own gleeful peril. The amusement tax is on Evan Nicholls, so inhale the tiny complexities and absurd escalations and behold the scenes that play out in the rainbow-sprinkled fumes you exhale.
- Vik Shirley, author of Some Deer
Evan Nicholls' Easy Tiger features gemlike poems and poem-like collages that knot together life and myth in tiny, anti-tall tales and fragments thereof. Fun to read and minimalistically expansive.
- Mark Leidner, author of Returning the Sword to the Stone
