HOBBLE CREEK ALMANAC is a love poem to and for a place, a journey through time and memory celebrating the concept of home, history, and historicity. These are thoughtful, beautifully imaged poems sung by a voice that rings mountain water sparkling clear. Each poem is a riverstone, smooth and polished, easy to hold in the palm, warm in the pocket, a lodestone for the dark corners of imagination and memory, linked by the gossamer strands of life reflection. ---David Lee, former Utah Poet Laureate 'First you have to imagine,' begins Justin Evan's wily, beguiling collection of poems, and he is up to the task. This is a work of prodigious imagination. Its themes of movement, both inner and outer, searching for spiritual enlightenment, and building for the future or an equivalent semi-permanence, are worked out organically in a heightened language and playfulness that may remind one of Stephen Dunn or Dennis Johnson. 'Building your allotted portion of Utopia/isn't easy,' he reminds us, only to add later, 'I doubt anything of mine/will last that long.' Hobble Creek Almanac is the work of a poet coming into his own, stretching his gifts, offering commitment and perceptiveness, and simultaneously extending to the reader a welcome and a warning. Follow me, it says, have faith. ---Corey Mesler, author of Before the Great Troubling, and Our Locust Years