The National Book Awards announced their poetry longlist this week. We at BookPeople are excited to promote poetry to our customers. Poetry is good for the soul, and here are six poets who are doing really well in the soul-goodness department. We highly encourage you to know, love, and cherish their work.
This Blue by Maureen N. McLane
“From lichens to malls to merchant republics, it’s “another day in this here cosmos,” in Maureen N. McLane’s stunning third poetry collection, This Blue. Here are songs for and of a new century, poems both archaic and wholly now. In the middle of life, stationed in our common “Terran Life,” the poet conjures urban pigeons, Adirondack mountains, Genoa, Andalucía, Belfast, Parma; here is a world sounded out, broken, possibly shareable, newly named: “Take it up Old Adam— / everyday the world exists / to be named.” This Blue is a searching and a singing—intricate, sexy, smart.”
Roget’s Illusion by Linda Bierds
“Her poems, with their constantly surprising delicacy and their language rich with insight and a sensuous music, radiate real power and authority and animal presence.” —W. S. Merwin (U.S. Poet Laureate, 2010–2011)
A Several World by Brian Blanchfield
“This clever, busy, anxious, flirtatious poet, with his ‘predilections for predicaments, ‘ can connect anything to anything else.”–Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück
“You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight’s undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you’ve always known, that first primer where “on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball” and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, “the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball.” Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.”
“The Feel Trio is Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. Or is it that The Feel Trio are Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker? See, that’s the amazing problem and chance, right there! In the wake and air and light of The Feel Trio, what it bears and what propels them, which is everything in particular, The Feel Trio tries to put some things together…” —Fred Moten
Gabriel: A Poem by Edward Hirsch
“Embedded within Gabriel is a picaresque novella about a tempestuous boy and young man, a part Hirsch calls ‘the adventures of Gabriel…’ [The poet] Eavan Boland described Gabriel as ‘a masterpiece of sorrow. . . the creation of the loved and lost boy is one of the poem’s most important effects.'”–Alec Wilkinson, The New Yorker
Second Childhood by Fanny Howe
“Masterfully lyrical. . . . Howe navigates between indeterminate and shifting speakers and addressees with a wide array of tools, like obfuscating shadows, contradictions, and a precious, serene delicacy that channels a childlike marvel.”—Publishers Weekly
Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
“Accounts of racially charged interactions, insidious and flagrant, transpiring in private and in the public eye, distill the immediate emotional intensity of individual experience with tremendous precision while allowing ambiguity, ambivalence, contradiction, and exhaustion to remain in all their fraught complexity. . . . Once again Rankine inspires sympathy and outrage, but most of all a will to take a deep look at ourselves and our society.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
The Road to Emmaus by Spencer Reece
“These poems form a true and riveting narrative. Reading Reece makes you recall why you love poetry.” —Annie Dillard, author of The Maytrees and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Collected Poems by Mark Strand
“Gathered here is a half century’s work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets.”
BookPeople 