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.