ethan s. evans

I think of myself as a writer/scholar in the wake of both the opioid epidemic and the start of the collapse of the american empire; I'm interested in how the ethos of what I was taught about substance use (that it is, ultimately, a spiritual disease, the locus of which is in the individual) resembles the kind of neoliberalism that is still parroted about environmentalism/sustainability— that it's up to all of us to change our individual consumptive habits and, by doing so, we can ward off catastrophe. My poem takes place in the Alleghany Range/Greenbrier Valley section of West Virginia; once the site of a secret congressional fallout shelter hidden under a resort, still the site (outside of the resort towns) of worsening poverty— due, in particular, to the legacy of extractive capitalism an addiction crisis fueled by Purdue Pharmaceuticals. It's also a region with spectacular biodiversity, including cranberry bogs/glades, spruce-fir forests, and other habitats that were otherwise extirpated from Appalachia, either due to glacial recession/warming temperatures or human intervention. This poem is my attempt to imagine the resiliency of these habitats alongside the peril, past and present, that surrounds them.