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Nine Persimmons
Kerry James Evans (Author)
9781496243713
Paperback / softback, published 1 March 2026
84 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg
"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
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.
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