After announcing the 2015 National Book Awards long list for Young People’s Literature yesterday, the National Book Foundation did the same for the Poetry category this morning. Two previous winners of the Awards made this year’s list: Marilyn Hacker and Terrance Hayes from 1975 and 2010 respectively.
Looking at the list each year reaffirms for me what excellent poetry looks like: imagery, as opposed to literal descriptors; unforced language or rhythm; displaying a concept’s evolution with each written line.
Hayes, who won with the collection Lighthead and has been nominated for How to be Drawn, demonstrates poetic excellence in the way he can unpack and integrate two images in a single piece. Check out his reading of “How To Be Drawn To Trouble” at Cave Canem, where his chosen two images are his mother and James Brown:
You’ll love this YouTube treat I found about Hacker—who won with Presentation Piece, and made this year’s long list with A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2014. There was a vinyl album release of her work during the 70s and this clip features Hacker reading the poem “Presentation Piece.”
The short list will be released on Thursday, October 15, and the winners will be announced at the National Book Awards dinner in New York on Wednesday, Nov. 18.
The entire poetry long list is below.
Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Pitt Poetry Series/University of Pittsburgh Press
Amy Gerstler, Scattered at Sea
Penguin Books/Penguin Random House
Marilyn Hacker, A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems, 1994-2014
W. W. Norton & Company
Terrance Hayes, How to Be Drawn
Penguin Books/Penguin Random House
Jane Hirshfield, The Beauty
Alfred A. Knopf
Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
Alfred A. Knopf
Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things
Milkweed Editions
Patrick Phillips, Elegy for a Broken Machine
Alfred A. Knopf
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Heaven
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lawrence Raab, Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts
Tupelo Press
h/t – The New Yorker.
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