Much of Evan Gray's work in Thickets Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars comes out of a tradition of working-class writers and artists. As I read his poetry collection, I was reminded of poets like B. H. Fairchild and Philip Levine who both wrote about the pains, pleasures, and importance of work, but Gray's work is much more than this. While his poetry often discusses how hard work affects the lives of people, it is only one part of a larger discussion of the importance of living well. Evan Gray writes about what it is to be a part of the culture of western North Carolina. It is not so much dedicated to debunking Appalachian stereotypes as it is to showing what that place is today and how it came to be that way. He describes the sacred emotionally and intellectually complex world that he occupies, and the result is a body of work that necessarily describes a place but also rises to universality, so he is both describing that world and the nature of life in the 21st century. It is complex and important poetry that demands that we rise to understand him.
     The importance of work and the effect it has had on Gray and his family are two of the key concepts of the collection. The world of work is both painful and ennobling. It is difficult and rewarding. On one hand there is Denny, who loses his innocence in a way that reminded me of Winslow Homer's painting Crack the Whip. In this painting, wild boys play exuberantly in front of a schoolhouse that threatens to tame them. Denny in Gray's poetry is a seven-year-old who is also becoming tamed, less himself because of the way his school and his mother's work define who they are. "Denny's mother worked at the factory and every so often, during PE, he would try to escape and run toward her, imagining she would be waiting for his embrace: happy, whole, and angelic. Denny would always get caught before he could make it off the playground" (13). Work is a force of confinement in one way. The factory confines his mother and creates an artificial boundary between her and her son. It was also necessary as the children of the school discover when "All the folks that had come to work there for years stopped coming" (13). All of this is summed up in an earlier poem when he quotes Studs Terkel: "This book, being about work is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as to the body" (8). But it truly is more than that. In one poem, he asks, "Why do we try to live sometimes inside a broken machine that is both animal and human" (35). He has watched the bodies of the men of his family break down, and now he is at work too. It is an almost supernatural force, confining and malevolent. "There must be a fine weaver of lines who holds all my cards" (35). That weaver has defined his life narrowly.
     Gray also shows us how those aspects of Appalachian life that are often stereotyped and dismissed are a part of an intellectual and spiritual approach.

after I began to drink I also began to deer hunt
deer hunting became ministry and a keepsake

to talk at school about how big the last one was
I have never shot an identifiable male with gnarled horns

I have worn horns on my head that cover my face
I have filled Mountain Dew bottles with dip spit (19).

Gray puts moments like these, moments of hunting and drinking that are often maligned and mocked, into a cultural context. In his hands, they seem almost to be a sacred ritual. They are about coming of age and participating in the context of the world he lives in. Every place has these rituals and markers. In his collection he puts them into their proper context rather than a cartoonish exaggeration that is easy to dismiss and parody. He writes a similar passage later: "Over the guardrail, I was carried in the smell of buck deer guts rising like Elijah called to heaven" (68). This collection is infused with the mythic, the religious, the spiritual, as we might imagine that his life is as all our lives are. And those things that bring spiritual meaning to him are what we might expect, the gathering of food and the entry into adult life. They are the things that bring meaning to us all.
     Evan Gray's Thicket Swamped in Fence-Coated Briars is an exceptional collection. It is not an easy book to breeze through, and after my first reading, I found myself in a nonlinear rereading of the work, going through the poems at random at first and then trying to make emotional connections to poems I had already read and was just beginning to digest. It is richer for that experience. I hear it calling to me again even now after having wrestled and written about it.