The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention 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.
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.
"'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."--Tomas Q. Morin, 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 "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
