The National Book Award Longlist, Vol. 2: Poetry
If you’re like me, it’s been a while since you’ve read a poem. Consider this your invitation back. The National Book Award longlist for Poetry is out! See the ten selected collections below.
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Tree of Knowledge
Victoria Chang
A poet watches the limbs of a eucalyptus tree get sawed off: the image persists, refracting and recurring across poems of art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss.
Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be.
Men assess the eucalyptus tree growing on the poet’s street; a crane arrives. The sound of a chainsaw rings in the air and branches begin to fall. This tree-cutting haunts the poet and becomes the locus from which the rest of the collection spirals. It refracts across works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell, and Hilma af Klint, whose painting series lends the collection its title and who becomes a model for engaging with the world. At the core of the collection, the long poem “Eureka” examines the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from the eponymous California town. Roving, evocative, and intricate, Tree of Knowledge is rooted in Victoria Chang’s crystalline voice and generous, probing gaze, and by certain images—trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase—that resurface like apparitions.
Hide
Carolina Ebeid
A reinvention of visual poetry and personal history charting exile’s impact on memory, identity, and futurity
Intellectual and intimate, Carolina Ebeid’s Hide gathers shreds of memory, dream, and the ordinary artifacts of diaspora, as the poet casts a sounding line into her patrilineal and matrilineal histories in Palestine and Cuba. With the hum of cassettes and the glow of projectors, these poems superimpose voice upon voice, image upon image, a here upon a there, to disclose the choral noise inside postmemory.
Hide is a restless innovation of form and multimodal expression breaking open words across Arabic, English, and Spanish to release hidden meanings. Poems trace the letter M back to the Phoenician pictograph of waves, while technological “glitches” are portals that summon oracular voices across the family archive. In swirling “spell” poems, Ebeid conjures Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, whose Siluetas write the human shape upon the earth.
Ebeid’s title is prismatic: Hide as in concealment, as in animal skin, as in to secret oneself away. Hide commands attention like a whispering voice, prompting readers to lean in, to listen for transmissions from ancestors and futurity both.
Ebeid’s title is multiplicitous: Hide as in to secret oneself away, as in skin, as in a surface to be written upon. Hide is a sizzling collection that commands attention like the sotto voce, prompting readers to lean in closer.
Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation
Brenda Hillman
Each of Brenda Hillman’s books has been transformative for her readers, and her twelfth collection is no exception. Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-twentieth century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. Like Hillman’s other pioneering work, these poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child’s neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women’s domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots. This remarkable collection will plunge readers into the mysteries of childhood and of childhood houses everywhere.
The Bronze Arms
Richie Hofmann
Recognizing the fragility of the body and soul in a world of threat, these startling poems stem from a central boyhood memory—the author’s near-drowning in a swimming pool on Crete. The observant child was troubled that none of the statues he saw had arms—and then it was his father’s arms lifting him from the water, saving his life.
Hofmann balances elegance and brutality as he explores the fables of that childhood as well as the contours of sex and relationships in modern cities, in order to write his own personal history of love and survival: “Masculine arms lifted me. / Masculine arms held me while I slept.” The poems navigate risks, abandonments, and rescues, moving through a series of mazes that become a labyrinth of erotic awakening, with quick turns and dangerous diversions. In poems that alternately sear and crush delicately, we wander the ruins where the self is lost and broken and ultimately reclaimed: at the dark center, in the heart of the past.
A triumphant follow-up to the fetching catalog of lovers in Hofmann’s last book, this collection thrills with its archaeology of self, its notes of austerity and decadence.
Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza
Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor’s language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens—a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.
We
Layli Long Soldier
In We, Layli Long Soldier examines what it means to be in community, to be in relation with family, nation, history, and language. We is the first-person plural, the pronoun of inclusion in English. It is also Wé, the Lakota word meaning “blood”—what is shared and what is shed.
In this ingenious and insightful arrangement of poems, lyric essays, and her own visual artworks presented in full color, Long Soldier creates unique spaces of collaboration, mentorship, and shared knowledge. The 184 X’s signed to a broken treaty, the fringes of a winged dress braided in honor of children lost to Indian boarding schools, and intricate Lakota star quilts become shapes and patterns that convey collective kinship, memory, and grievance. “From this day forward,” Long Soldier writes, “I declare a war of language.”
Promise/Threat
Jonah Mixon-Webster
“I’m coming to you live,” Jonah Mixon-Webster announces early on in Promise/Threat, “from the corner of Shit Blvd. and Out o’ Luck St. / with my monkey paws.” So begins a three-part journey of a troubled rebirth, one that ushers the reader through all the torment of a Dantean comedy as it climbs unsteadily from darkness to light, navigating an internalized landscape that evokes the Flint, Michigan, of the poet’s youth.
In the long central sequence, “Territory,” Mixon-Webster sets the reader in a mirror hall of dreams, where one’s nemesis (or one’s self) is always lurking around the corner. Violences of the waking life trickle into the narrator’s sleep as he flees from vision to vision, “picking fruit in one dream and eating it in the next.” In the book’s third and final section, as the poet begins to wake, he finds that the “real poem is the life I’m writing.” Mixon-Webster’s musings turn to love and the often-destructive desires it provokes in us as he grapples with how to carry the burden of a past that threatens to sabotage the future.
JOAN
Jake Rose
Collapsing biography and autobiography, the poetry of Jake Rose’s debut explores queer identity, grief, and desire through the historical framework of Joan of Arc’s life. Moving through rural landscapes of the speaker’s youth, contradictions of faith, consequences of desire, and fragmentations of trauma, JOAN is structured as an excavation of the speaker’s most intimate moments, combining poetry with historical quotations, visual collage, and a sequence of film stills. Through vivid lyric moments, the poems construct a speaker and world both intimate and charged—“I have to touch my farthest feeling,” “the sapphire dusk draping its lace arias”—with clarity and vibrant intensity. Refusing resolution, these poems dwell in rupture, reinvention, and fluid forms of gender that come to life outside of inherited boundaries. This collection speaks from the margins, searching for a body the self might inhabit and asking what it means to transform through language, gender, and desire.
Horses
Jake Skeets
With Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, Jake Skeets emerged as a visionary new literary voice, offering readers a queer, Indigenous poetics inextricable from a connection to land. With Horses, Skeets tracks the shifting land of the Navajo Nation: What changes and what remains the same in a place that has been inhabited for thousands of years?
In poems employing numbers significant to Diné thought and lifeway, Skeets explores the reclamation of land, imagination, and language—a world beyond environmental apocalypse, where joy is possible and where transformation is embraced over erasure. Arranged as a quartet, Horses begins with a meditation on two hundred horses found dead, mired in mud that had once been a stock pond on Navajo land in Arizona. What was once a source of life had become a death trap for a herd living on the edge of survival. From here, Skeets’s poems radiate outward, tracing the body and its relationship to a landscape marked by geologic time and the fragile, eroding moments of the present.
Bramble
Susan Stewart
In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle that comes with living in time and searching beyond appearances. The rough thicket presents impediments, yet it also bears fruit and delicate flowers.
With Bramble, Susan Stewart has composed a book of many forms, including satires, elegies, meditations, and songs. Bramble is also an exploration of the act of making such forms. The book’s three sections—“Mirror,” “Briar,” and “Channel”—link lyric time to our lives as they are situated in history and nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.
Finalists get announced October 6. We’ll be watching.
What’s calling to you from this list?
