Nine Persimmons: The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Autor Kerry James Evansen Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 2026
In Nine Persimmons Kerry James Evans traces a geography both intimate and far-flung—Tuscaloosa and Biloxi, Charleston and New Orleans, the Cloisters above Washington Heights, a banana orchard in the Azores, a journey to Rome. The poems move with the gravity of pilgrimage, their compass set between wandering and witness, as they cross from ballfields and shipyards into the charged realms of myth and ritual. Evans’s gift lies in how the ordinary gathers its own divinity: persimmon seeds split to forecast winter, a grandmother’s weed-eater gospel, Camaro burnouts paired with tarot, psalms rising as pelicans wheel into sudden sky. In this light Nine Persimmons reveals how the most unassuming corners of existence sometimes hold the deepest truths.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496243713
ISBN-10: 1496243714
Pagini: 84
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.12 kg
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496243714
Pagini: 84
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.12 kg
Editura: The Backwaters Press
Colecția The Backwaters Press
Seria The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Kerry James Evans is an associate professor of English at Georgia College and State University, where he coordinates the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. He is the author of the poetry collection Bangalore. A recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, his poems have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He is the coeditor and managing editor of Peach.
Extras
The Heavens Opened, and God Said,
All endings, even mine, will be yours.
Take the Chevrolet Camaro—a
popular car in Florida.
Not only will Florida cease
to exist, but so will every
yellow Camaro double-parked
in a roped-off
field outside
the nearest fall festival
with its haunted corn maze
and pumpkin patch—its
local ac/dc cover band
reuniting for one last tour.
Fear not, my child. Those songs
live on. They carry like bubbles
drawn from a soapy wand.
You are like a branch
that has forgotten the trunk,
a bird in a lightning storm,
waves lingering at the shore.
I am sand. I am the wave, the wind,
the red flag whipping a blue sky.
Would you believe me if I said
you and I are both blue sky?
Would you try? Do you ever
wonder what frustrates me?
Never-ending guitar solos,
legalese, and skinny pawn brokers.
Do you hear the guitar solo?
What about the neighbor’s kids
burning donuts in deserted
quarries? Their bare-chested
howl is a hymn all its own.
Once, the universe was a series
of wheels within wheels. Now,
it is a shattered urn. In the beginning,
it was good—in the beginning.
The World
My parents were married in the living room of my uncle’s trailer with me
still
in my mother’s womb. My mother, with her new license, loved Dolly Parton
and roller skating.
She was sixteen. My father, eighteen, both scared out of their minds,
ignorant of a world
beyond their high school districts—beyond
“big towns” like Birmingham
or Tuscaloosa—Roll Tide.
Shit. It was 1983. Trickle-down
economics, cocaine, and bull markets.
Reagan,
the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, sixty-threedead, the invasion of Grenada,
the release
of Return of the Jedi, because Lord knows what this world needs
is a robed brat
with father issues wielding a laser. What do I know? I was conceived
in the back seat
of a ’66 Ford Falcon—a car I restored in high school, now retired
to a junkyard
in northern Virginia after two divorces and a suicide attempt,
but who cares
about a car? A sophomore, my mother carried me into a school at full term
and learned
how to look down, but who cares about how mean kids can be?
What awful things
they said to her. My father would join the Air Force to
get her out of there—
they would try to make it work, but fail to make it work. They were kids
taking on the impossible.
I would attend eight schools k–12, reside in more than twenty-seven domiciles,
never once
calling one home—would learn friends is a name for people you must forget.
Look at me now
—a thirty-eight-year-old revolver loaded in the glove box.
Open it.
Look at my father’s hands around my neck. Look at his father’s hands
around his.
Look how hungry I still am, how confused—how I am a country
tearing itself
to pieces in a C-store parking lot. What do I even know? My poor mother
still sixteen—
McDonald’s three, four times a week, no retirement, obese,
votes
for a party controlled by billionaires—yet I call her once a week, tell her
I love you, and I do.
I love my father, who can’t write a sentence, but commands troops
in the Army—who
will retire any day now, and I love you, reader, who knows so little about me
—who tries not to,
but can’t help but judge me for how I say these things so casually—how
my drawl
reappears like azalea blossoms in spring, then poof!
Gone with the first rain.
All endings, even mine, will be yours.
Take the Chevrolet Camaro—a
popular car in Florida.
Not only will Florida cease
to exist, but so will every
yellow Camaro double-parked
in a roped-off
field outside
the nearest fall festival
with its haunted corn maze
and pumpkin patch—its
local ac/dc cover band
reuniting for one last tour.
Fear not, my child. Those songs
live on. They carry like bubbles
drawn from a soapy wand.
You are like a branch
that has forgotten the trunk,
a bird in a lightning storm,
waves lingering at the shore.
I am sand. I am the wave, the wind,
the red flag whipping a blue sky.
Would you believe me if I said
you and I are both blue sky?
Would you try? Do you ever
wonder what frustrates me?
Never-ending guitar solos,
legalese, and skinny pawn brokers.
Do you hear the guitar solo?
What about the neighbor’s kids
burning donuts in deserted
quarries? Their bare-chested
howl is a hymn all its own.
Once, the universe was a series
of wheels within wheels. Now,
it is a shattered urn. In the beginning,
it was good—in the beginning.
The World
My parents were married in the living room of my uncle’s trailer with me
still
in my mother’s womb. My mother, with her new license, loved Dolly Parton
and roller skating.
She was sixteen. My father, eighteen, both scared out of their minds,
ignorant of a world
beyond their high school districts—beyond
“big towns” like Birmingham
or Tuscaloosa—Roll Tide.
Shit. It was 1983. Trickle-down
economics, cocaine, and bull markets.
Reagan,
the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, sixty-threedead, the invasion of Grenada,
the release
of Return of the Jedi, because Lord knows what this world needs
is a robed brat
with father issues wielding a laser. What do I know? I was conceived
in the back seat
of a ’66 Ford Falcon—a car I restored in high school, now retired
to a junkyard
in northern Virginia after two divorces and a suicide attempt,
but who cares
about a car? A sophomore, my mother carried me into a school at full term
and learned
how to look down, but who cares about how mean kids can be?
What awful things
they said to her. My father would join the Air Force to
get her out of there—
they would try to make it work, but fail to make it work. They were kids
taking on the impossible.
I would attend eight schools k–12, reside in more than twenty-seven domiciles,
never once
calling one home—would learn friends is a name for people you must forget.
Look at me now
—a thirty-eight-year-old revolver loaded in the glove box.
Open it.
Look at my father’s hands around my neck. Look at his father’s hands
around his.
Look how hungry I still am, how confused—how I am a country
tearing itself
to pieces in a C-store parking lot. What do I even know? My poor mother
still sixteen—
McDonald’s three, four times a week, no retirement, obese,
votes
for a party controlled by billionaires—yet I call her once a week, tell her
I love you, and I do.
I love my father, who can’t write a sentence, but commands troops
in the Army—who
will retire any day now, and I love you, reader, who knows so little about me
—who tries not to,
but can’t help but judge me for how I say these things so casually—how
my drawl
reappears like azalea blossoms in spring, then poof!
Gone with the first rain.
Cuprins
The Heavens Opened, and God Said
1
The World
The Photograph, Boy in Window
A Bit of Luck
Kickball Cowboy
Metaphysical Citrus
The French Horn
Highway 45 Truck Stop
Nine Persimmons
After the Rain
Winter in Georgia
The Alley
Sun & Moon
2
The Sun King
Changing a Truck Battery
Coal
Mississippi Snow
Refrain
The Minister of Macaroni
My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance
Heat Index
The Man in the Bucket
The Beehive
Tooth of the Lion
Self-Portrait as Peach Orchard
3
Manatee
My Unborn
Pulchrum est Paucorum Hominum
Nectarine
Field
The High Priestess
Maria
Buffalo Rock
The Wayne C. Henderson Music Festival, Grayson Highlands State Park
“Fantastic Pelicans Arrive”
The Peninsula
Medieval Meditation
Holy
Source Acknowledgments
1
The World
The Photograph, Boy in Window
A Bit of Luck
Kickball Cowboy
Metaphysical Citrus
The French Horn
Highway 45 Truck Stop
Nine Persimmons
After the Rain
Winter in Georgia
The Alley
Sun & Moon
2
The Sun King
Changing a Truck Battery
Coal
Mississippi Snow
Refrain
The Minister of Macaroni
My Younger Self Attempts Breakdancing at the Sadie Hawkins Dance
Heat Index
The Man in the Bucket
The Beehive
Tooth of the Lion
Self-Portrait as Peach Orchard
3
Manatee
My Unborn
Pulchrum est Paucorum Hominum
Nectarine
Field
The High Priestess
Maria
Buffalo Rock
The Wayne C. Henderson Music Festival, Grayson Highlands State Park
“Fantastic Pelicans Arrive”
The Peninsula
Medieval Meditation
Holy
Source Acknowledgments
Recenzii
“Kerry James Evans mines his own experience, and with each poem unboxes honest feelings. His rules are simple: make sense, sing without pretension, take chances, imagine, reveal. The wonder is that he never seems to strain as he fights for that impossible understanding, poetry. Nine Persimmons is a major victory.”—Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues and Alabama
“‘I play it out measure by measure,’ writes Kerry James Evans. And those soulful measures are filled with a music that is unabashedly Southern. These poems are haunted, full of grit, and down-home. They have no quit in them. If the great Harry Crews had written poetry, he might have written something like Evans’s Nine Persimmons.”—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete and Patient Zero
“How does a poet write if an eight-year-old heart still knocks in his chest? A child peers out a car window and beckons to the moon, ‘Come to me, Moon.’ In Kerry James Evans’s Nine Persimmons the moon conspires, and the sun, the crack in the living room wall, pelicans, guitars, a bag of ice, a French horn, and even God all deliver. The tone, longing. In an honest voice born from a hardscrabble childhood rich with love and labor, Evans gives us a book of ‘peanuts and Coca-Cola and a sprinkling of New Testament.’ A book of struggle where here, in rural Georgia, ‘is the heaven of Paradisio.’”—Alice Friman, author of On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems
“‘I play it out measure by measure,’ writes Kerry James Evans. And those soulful measures are filled with a music that is unabashedly Southern. These poems are haunted, full of grit, and down-home. They have no quit in them. If the great Harry Crews had written poetry, he might have written something like Evans’s Nine Persimmons.”—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete and Patient Zero
“How does a poet write if an eight-year-old heart still knocks in his chest? A child peers out a car window and beckons to the moon, ‘Come to me, Moon.’ In Kerry James Evans’s Nine Persimmons the moon conspires, and the sun, the crack in the living room wall, pelicans, guitars, a bag of ice, a French horn, and even God all deliver. The tone, longing. In an honest voice born from a hardscrabble childhood rich with love and labor, Evans gives us a book of ‘peanuts and Coca-Cola and a sprinkling of New Testament.’ A book of struggle where here, in rural Georgia, ‘is the heaven of Paradisio.’”—Alice Friman, author of On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems
Descriere
Kerry James Evans charts the jagged edges of family, longing, and place, capturing fleeting moments with an honesty that resonates across a lifetime.