Kerry James Evans is the author of Nine Persimmons (Backwaters Press, 2026) and Bangalore (Copper Canyon), a Lannan Literary Selection. He earned a PhD in English from Florida State University, an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, and a BA in English from Missouri State University.

How does one write about their own book? What do I want to share? Don’t the poems speak for themselves? Was Roland Barthes right? Is the author dead once the book is in the world? Does that make me a ghost here? Am I haunting a book that belongs to a world that has left me behind? Am I even the author or the voice of someone who once was the author of this collection?

If I am a ghost, I hope you’re not scared, reading this. My step-grandmother had a great story about her mother’s apparition appearing in her favorite blue dress three days after her funeral. She was standing in front of the house at dusk, and when my step-grandmother called out, her mother didn’t say a word, only pointed up—at what, she didn’t know—but when I asked if she was scared, she said, “Not at all.”

Her yard was once a fruit orchard. At Easter she’d hide eggs in the stumpholes and remaining trees. Whoever collected the most got a candy bar. The rest, a handful of Tootsie Rolls. Now she’s widowed and confined to a single-bedroom apartment.

Was it Heidegger who said that “language is a house of being?” Why is it as soon as I ask that question an orchestra of crickets crescendos near the wood line, where a gully graveyard of washing machines and old cars, appliances and junk rise out, half buried, like jagged tombstones? Here comes Orpheus with his lyre. There naps the mouse between the dry-rotted cushions that once lived in a Chevrolet Silverado.

As a boy, I considered what it would be like to be a bird at least once a week. Not always hawks or eagles either. Small birds: cardinals, canaries, jays. Of course, I never became a bird. I’m human. But it didn’t seem impossible. I fell in love a lot too. Not just with girls, but with shapes and sounds. I could play basketball all day or watch it bounce on the floor, swish nylon. There was no difference, really. I’d see a tree and wonder why it didn’t walk around and mingle with the other trees. Why couldn’t I hear the music in its blossoms? How could something so beautiful not sing?

So I listened. I pointed at stumpholes where an orchard once stood.