Evidences

James McCorkle

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Evidences is the winner of the sixth annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, as chosen by poet Jorie Graham. In poems that are by turns lyrical, disjunctive, autobiographical, and political, the poems in Evidences sift through residues of landscape and history. The physicality of the language and the invocation of the world of places and things form a meditative process, essaying the conditions of perception and memory.

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ISBN: 9780971898141

Format: Paperback

The New Season

Trees well into green pyres,
The path full of petals,
everything in flood.
Drenched by lilacs
gathered after a late night walk,
Alphabets of fragrances spin.

Across the lake
after a windstorm,
Carrying their messages for this one life.
Everything is a guide,
I had thought,
But then the world would be here
Only to keep us from becoming lost—

Birds rise
in fevered astonishment,
The sky stained by lupines—
the world is here,
And going without need of ourselves.

The tips of trees point to the sky.
Between tar-streaked
buildings ocher-green showers
Of willows curtain the lake.

Gulls rise—white-caps—
then slide out of view
With the idea of the soul,
the years have filtered
To thin sediments, the air a puzzle of flies and pollen.

No words outside this landscape’s domain—
Nothing is periphery.
disappearing, sabotaged, refused—
Only this world, this accord.

About the Author

James McCorkle received the 2003 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his collection Evidences, selected by Jorie Graham. His subsequent collections of poetry include The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014) and In Time (as part of the volume Triptych, from Etruscan Press in 2020). Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, McCorkle lives in Geneva, New York, and, since 2005, has taught in the Africana Studies program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of …

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Reviews

“[James McCorkle is] a poet who, for all his commitment to the thicknesses of texture, is equally attuned to breath, to freshness, to tracings and overtracings.” —Jorie Graham

“McCorkle daubs and spangles his poems… Nothing lies outside of [his] sense vocabulary… The poet’s search is for truth, ultimately… And yet, McCorkle’s success is not that he undertakes the quest but that he allows readers to experience it so vividly… Evidences is a ‘difficult’ poetry, but not because the poems elude us; rather, it’s because the poet’s portrayal of our elusive world is so heartbreakingly true.” —Darin Ciccotelli