John W. Evans’ The Fight Journal, winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize and published by Rattle in 2023 (the first chapbook of my Rattle subscription, in fact!), pulled me in from uncomfortable beginning and held me through bittersweet ending. It’s a sad, difficult book: it is, after all, about divorce. I think it’s also about mental illness, and gendering. But I also think I am not the right person to review it.
The story Evans tells is of his own divorce. The Fight Journal is angry and sad and confused, and at times I wonder if he is, unconciously, continuing on what he writes in section 15 of the titular poem, “The Fight Journal”:
“It’s like you guys are fighting a PR war,” / a friend said, “in a newspaper that no one is reading.” // He wasn’t wrong. We lost the thread of every story. / We retreated into our respective camps // of friends and family who, at best, / wished us well but wanted no part of the drama // except to agree that we were right, / which was all we asked. What else was there // to control except the opinions of those / who would always choose to love us?
“The Fight Journal” the poem aches, and so does The Fight Journal the chapbook, and confusion seeps out of every word. Evans’ own layered pain and loss—his first wife died in a freak bear attack—surfaces and submerges throughout the poems here, as does his now ex-wife’s responses to it. And I, as the daughter of a mentally ill man, found myself wondering, again and again, if perhaps Evans had needed to do a bit more work on his own demons before he got married. (It’s worth noting, I think, that section 21 of “The Fight Journal” actually explores their decidedly whirlwind relationship.)
The Fight Journal is a sorrowful book, an exploration of the thousand ways in which a marriage, and a life, can unravel. It’s both modern and timeless, an uneasy read that will stick in the mind for a long time after its pages have been read.
Essentially a Nerd 