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. “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 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 . The Heavens Opened, and God Said,   All endings, even mine, will be yours. Take the Chevrolet Camaro―a popular car in Florida. Not only will Florida cease   to exist, but so will every yellow Camaro double-parked in a roped-off field outside the nearest fall festival   with its haunted corn maze and pumpkin patch―its local ac/dc cover band reuniting for one last tour.   Fear not, my child. Those songs live on. They carry like bubbles drawn from a soapy wand. You are like a branch   that has forgotten the trunk, a bird in a lightning storm, waves lingering at the shore. I am sand. I am the wave, the wind,   the red flag whipping a blue sky. Would you believe me if I said you and I are both blue sky? Would you try? Do you ever   wonder what frustrates me? Never-ending guitar solos, legalese, and skinny pawn brokers. Do you hear the guitar solo? What about the neighbor’s kids burning donuts in deserted quarries? Their bare-chested howl is a hymn all its own.   Once, the universe was a series of wheels within wheels. Now, it is a shattered urn. In the beginning, it was good―in the beginning. The World My parents were married in the living room of my uncle’s trailer with me still in my mother’s womb. My mother, with her new license, loved Dolly Parton and roller skating.   She was sixteen. My father, eighteen, both scared out of their minds, ignorant of a world beyond their high school districts―beyond “big towns” like Birmingham or Tuscaloosa― Roll Tide .   Shit. It was 1983. Trickle-down economics, cocaine, and bull markets. Reagan, the U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut, sixty-threedead, the invasion of Grenada, the release   of Return of the Jedi , because Lord knows what this world needs is a robed brat with father issues wielding a laser. What do I know? I was conceived in the back seat   of a ’66 Ford Falcon―a car I restored in high school, now retired to a junkyard in northern Virginia after two divorces and a suicide attempt, but who cares   about a car? A sophomore, my mother carried me into a school at full term and learned how to look down, but who cares about how mean kids can be? What awful things   they said to her. My father would join the Air Force to get her out of there ― they