Full Description
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.
Contents
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
