There's a Book for That: Poetry Prize Winners!
Let’s continue our celebration of National Poetry Month with prize winners! From major awards for a single collection of poems like the Pulitzer or National Book Award to lifetime achievement awards such as the Nobel Prize or The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the books below silently shout truth and beauty! This year’s excitement was Kevin Young winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Night Watch. With so much depth and variety of expression, let these poems take you where they will.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY
From the award-winning poet at the height of his career, a book of personal and American experiences, both beautiful and troubling, touching on the generative cycle of loss and renewal. Following on his exquisite Stones, Kevin Young’s new collection, written over the span of sixteen years, shapes stories of loss and legacy, inspired in part by other lives.
“Night Watch continues one of the most vital currents in contemporary poetry, transforming history and its silences into lyric through the poet’s eloquent invitation: ‘O wounded soul,/ speak.’” —The New York Times
Winner Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement
A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a “powerfully evocative” (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time.
A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history.
An important new work of poetry from Alice Notley, winner of the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness…Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet’s ruin.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
From one of today’s best poets—a stunningly poignant sequence of poems that tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
An intimate collection of poems that “picks up where Stag’s Leap left off, which is to say that it contains some of the best and most ingenious poems of her career.” —The New York Times
Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry
In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for “the only animal that commits suicide,” and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, 1986
“This is a lovely and moving collection, and it has not only the courage of its strong emotions, but the language and form that makes and keeps them clear and true.” —Anthony Hecht
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Strand’s poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with “the weather of leavetaking,” but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995
Written in a voice that moves between elegy and prayer, The Simple Truth contains thirty-three poems whose aim is to weave a complex tapestry of myth, history (both public and private), family, memory, and invention in a search for truths so basic and universal they often escape us all.
Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award Winner)
First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. Not only in the title poem, which the critic John Russell called “one of the finest long poems of our period,” but throughout the entire volume, Ashbery reaffirms the poetic power that made him an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Many of the poems in this eighth collection by Carl Dennis involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding.
The most popular work by Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet: A Penguin Classic
When it appeared in 1924, this work launched into the international spotlight a young and unknown poet whose writings would ignite a generation. W. S. Merwin’s incomparable translation faces the original Spanish text. Now in a black-spine Classics edition with an introduction by Cristina Garcia, this book stands as an essential collection that continues to inspire lovers and poets around the world.
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