Nine Persimmons

Kerry James Evans

• Publisher: The Backwaters Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781496246042
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• The Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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—Hamilton, Mississippi
• 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—Rider-Waite Tarot Deck
• Maria
• Buffalo Rock
• The Wayne C. Henderson Music Festival, Grayson Highlands State Park
• “Fantastic Pelicans Arrive”
• The Peninsula—Downtown Charleston
• Medieval Meditation
• Holy
• Source Acknowledgments