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. His latest book Nine Persimmons (Backwaters Press, 2026) is the 2024 Backwaters Press 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.

After the Rain

Robins everywhere—in the trees,
on the ground, scratching at the leaves for bugs,

rejoicing, and above, the white eye,
slow to blink, is full

and shining between two pines,
where a banana spider restrings her web,

which is her story—every thread,
but there’s more here than mere story.

There are robins in the birdbath, on the roof
—a shrill song filling the high ceilings

of early morning, where revelation
is a flash of red breast and two black coins for eyes

calling out—calling out with all its breath for a mate,
for sunrise, for the camellias to bloom.

The Minister of Macaroni

—after Wallace Stevens

At ten years old, I’d say he’s quite accomplished
switching on the burner, following directions
on the back of the box, the water
rising to a boil, how he stands
on a chair to drop in the macaroni,
then it’s two hands on the handle
and big muscles to the colander
waiting in the sink. Strain. Noodles
back to the pot. Stir in the mix. A real dinner,
he thinks to himself as he dishes out portions
for his brother and sister who are waiting
at the table, bowls in their hands.

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