Reading the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry Long List

I did not get along well with the poetry long list put out this year by the National Book Award judges. I didn't finish six of the ten. Four of the six were at least in part because of my sensitivity to the subject matter. I've learned that I currently have little to no tolerance for tragedy or the confessional mode at present. Two of the books I thought should not be categorized as poetry. Clearly the judges have more flexible attitudes toward where works fall on the poetry-not poetry spectrum than I do. I ended up wondering if part of the goal of the judges was to pick what they felt Americans should read as a matter of cultural awareness and self-reflection since five, possibly even six, of these books deal with marginalization and victimization. Unfortunately these are still very relevant topics both nationally and globally. However, I'm currently feeling tragedy fatigue and am not willing to read books on those topics, especially if I've read about them before and the language used isn't engaging enough to move me forward despite a distaste for the subject.

So here is a set of lists: their long list, their short list of finalists, a list of the ones I didn't finish, and the short list I would have made if it was up to me. After the lists, I have remarks about each book.

Here is their list:

https://www.nationalbook.org/2024-national-book-awards-longlist-for-poetry/

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma
Fady Joudah, […]
Dorianne Laux, Life on Earth
Gregory Pardlo, Spectral Evidence
Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Silver
Octavio Quintanilla, The Book of Wounded Sparrows
m.s. RedCherries, mother
Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living
Elizabeth Willis, Liontaming in America

Actual NBA finalists
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
[...] Fady Joudah
Mother by m.s. RedCherries
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

My DNFs (did not finish)
Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
[...] Fady Joudah
The Book of Wounded Sparrows by Octavio Quintanilla
mother by m.s. RedCherries
Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Liontaming in America by Elizabeth Willis

If I were to pick 5 finalists, which 5 would I have chosen?
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss
Spectral Evidence by Gregory Pardo
Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Life on Earth by Dorianne Laux
[...] by Fady Joudah (though I didn’t finish it)

My thoughts on them are presented below in the order I read them. *=The award winner chosen by the National Book Award judges. **=My favorite book of the ten.

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma DNF
New Directions Publishing
Probably the biggest reason I abandoned this about half way through was that I didn’t feel like I was reading poetry. I felt like I was reading flash fiction narratives. On top of that, I felt there were classical allusions were being dropped that were beyond me. I did appreciate some of the humor (what I perceived as humor). 

Dorianne Laux, Life on Earth
Norton / W. W. Norton & Company
I chose this book after Carson’s because I expected it to be about real life experiences and I wasn’t disappointed in this. It was a nice grounded reading experience after Wrong Norma. In Life on Earth, Laux is locating herself in her middle old age by discussing both the experience of aging, such as down-sizing her home, and of looking back over her life at memories of childhood and throughout her adulthood. Though tough, uncomfortable aspects of life are shown, this is essentially an optimistic and life-loving book. This would make a good summer read poetry book. Not in the way that we think of light fiction for summer reading but rather that this book seems centered in summer. Fall and winter are familiar and acknowledged but the optimism and fullness of summer, of a life well-lived, characterizes this book. Dorianne Laux is like a fragrant hot bath. There are aches and pains within it if you’re of a certain age and/or infirmity but it’s soothing and affirms that life is good and aches and pains can be eased.

**Diane Seuss, Modern Poetry
Graywolf Press
Seuss is a master of metaphor, simile and cynicism. Like Laux’s Life on Earth, these poems look at the present and the past but Seuss lacks Laux’s optimism despite pain. Seuss tends to take pain as a gritty given worth skewering with a metaphor or five. Suess’s book leans toward the confessional vein of poetry (while also showing some skepticism of it). In places she explores the line between personal responsibility and those things both personal and cultural that we inherit and then wrestle with or succumb to. If you like poetry in which a person examines how they got where they are and questions much of it along the way, including poetic axioms, Suess’s book is worth reading. It’s also worth reading for her gift of turns of phrase and quirky but apt comparisons in the quest to communicate the nuances of experience.

Warning: If you read Diane Seuss, you may begin seeing metaphors while driving. I’m not aware of any corrective lenses for this phenomenon.

Gregory Pardlo, Spectral Evidence
Knopf / Penguin Random House
I gave this 5 stars on Goodreads for an ambitious plan well executed. Pardlo explains the big project, which, in simple terms, is to explore racism and sexism and their intersection across time, personally and socially--through sets of discrete poems. To decide whether you're interested in this book, it's worthwhile reading the explanatory introduction and the references cited in the back of the book. If those two things interest you, read the whole thing.

The poems in the book look at incidents the poet was not directly involved in--deep into history--and incidents from his own life. There's an awareness of continuing to actively live through these issues and feeling the potential to put a dent in them while acknowledging how deep rooted they are. It's essentially looking at two forms of othering. He does a great job of selecting out language from historical texts that shows how absurd and illogical the rules or standards put in place to justify othering have been. Is it a perfect book? No. But I can easily see why it was on the National Book Award for poetry long list and it's worth reading if you think it behooves you to keep a spotlight on these issues. It would be great for discussion in a book club, whether a poetry book club or any other kind.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Silver

Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan Publishers  

It's my first time reading this poet. This is one of those poetry books that's for those in the know about poetry so I don't know how much it would be enjoyed by someone not in the know. I'd say I'm about 50% in the know about the classical and literary allusions he's making to his poet predecessors. He hides nothing in the table of contents itself, which includes titles such as Paradise Lost, Romanticism, Biographia Literaria, Prelude, Key West, Ars Poetica. Okay, so from the getgo I've clearly run smack into a poetry book full of poems about other poems or the writing of poems. This is usually a groanable state of affairs for me. I prefer poems that talk about the world outside of poetry. However, I have to admit, I really enjoyed this book, especially the way he talks back to Wordsworth and the Romantics. Does it make me want to run out and buy more of his books? No, but I enjoyed hearing him grapple with the tension between earlier poets, especially their focus on nature, and the world he lives in. He does so with an admirable balance of appreciation and pushback.

Fady Joudah, […] DNF
Milkweed Editions 

I am not a fan of the title but I get it. Many of the poems have the same [...] title. Immediately upon reading I understood that the ellipsis was intended to indicate an ongoing situation and was less bothered by it. I'm not going to fault Joudah’s poetry. The poems I read had some striking lines in them. My main issue is that I'm not up to reading another book with this subject matter at this time. Joudah is a Palestinian-American (and a doctor for those who like to read doctor poets) and it is the tragic Palestinian situation he is writing about. One of the early poems in the book is about the death of children. It's one of the best poems I've read of this kind. But do I want to read more? No.

Octavio Quintanilla, The Book of Wounded Sparrows DNF
Texas Review Press

If you want to understand how the separation of immigrant children from their parents affect them, this is the book for you. You also might enjoy it if you like a book that includes images by the poet. In this book, you also get poetry that varies in the way it makes use of the space on the page. As with Joudah’s book, what was a killer for me was the subject matter. I don’t need anyone to convince me of the damage that causes. I taught English as a Second Language to teens and adults for years and have heard of all sorts of border crossing trauma. So the poet is going to have to convince me that I want to read about this subject and he doesn’t. The first half focuses on his mother. I found it a kind of confessional poetry that didn’t appeal to me–stronger on the pathos than on poetic technique. The second section seems to focus on his father. Every now and then his talent as a poet shone through but I didn’t feel engaged enough to continue. Some of his art I liked and some did nothing for me. I didn’t find that the paintings added to the book particularly. They’re not integrated into the poetry but rather they’re in separate sections.

m.s. RedCherries, mother DNF
Penguin Books / Penguin Random House

RedCherries is Northern Cheyenne and this book is about the Native American experience. She makes a point of declaring at the front of the book that this is a book of characters rather than her own personal experience. None of this initially turned me off. In fact it made me optimistic and curious. But as I started to read it, it seemed like a lot of stuff I've read before. The "story," which is vague, didn't engage me. The only thing I found different from other Native lit I've read is that it is treating the 1970s as historical and there's a lot of roving in it. This is a hybrid book that goes back and forth from prose to poetry and is more prosy than poetic. It's one of those things where I've read better elsewhere on the same themes. I could see this being a worthwhile book in a Native American Lit class, but I'm not in one so I'm moving on.

*Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something About Living DNF
University of Akron Press 16.95
This one is again about Palestine/Gaza. I can see why this one won over [...] by Joudah. Tuffaha uses poetic techniques in terms of space on the page and textual changes. Her poems also seem to interweave narratives/perspectives more than Joudah's. However, if I had to choose between these two, I would have chosen Joudah's book. His language was much more interesting and he had some very evocative lines. With his book I regretted not wanting to read about the subject matter. With this book, I did not.

Elizabeth Willis, Liontaming in America DNF
New Directions Publishing
If you’re interested in an essay about the isolation of starting anew (think pioneering and exploration), read this book, your interest will be satisfied with something interesting that looks at this phenomenon in varied ways. But I saw very little poetry in it. It’s very expository. To me it’s creative nonfiction or a slightly creative essay. The language is not creative. The format is not creative. Even the narrative aspects of it are explaining the narrative more than providing the narrative. If I were to give this an award it would be in cultural criticism from a historical perspective. That's based on how far I got in the book. It may have made a turn toward religion, especially Mormonism, later. I would say it’s leaning toward conceptually complex but good essays are conceptually complex. Being conceptually complex is not solely, or even particularly the purview of poetry. Not at all. I’m curious to know why the author and/or publisher decided to categorize this as poetry.

Chapbook Adventures

I indulged in chapbooks from four different publishers: Foundlings Press, Sarabande Books, Black Lawrence Press, and Dancing Girl Press. Below is my impressions of each and a list of favorites.

Black Lawrence Press:

An Inconsiderate Madness by Helen Marie Casie (2007) (22 pgs of poetry)

Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen this book about the witch trials of the 1600s because they're never a happy story and they're not stories I'm eager to revisit. This book focuses specifically on the case of Mary Dyer. It highlights the complexity of women's lives at that time, the very raw situations in which everyone was trying to survive. Casie includes Mary's husband's plea for lenience, to have her behavior interpreted as "an inconsiderate madness," rather than possession.

The opening poem "New World" is evocative and beautifully written. However, this being a book dealing with historical people and events, most of the poems did not show off the fullness of Casie's poetic talents but rather leaned toward narrative with little embellishment. 

I've always felt that the teaching of history should include poetry and fiction to bring a period to life. I could absolutely see using this book for that purpose. Casie focuses her lens so that the harsh realities which people were trying to navigate at that time are delineated. I would primarily recommend this book to people who have a particular interest in this episode in American History.

Dominant Genes by SJ Sindu (2022) (33 pgs of poetry)

I've never heard anyone mention coming-of-age as a category of poetry but there are definitely poems and books of poems that fall into this category. This book is one of them. The poet is navigating having grown up outside of her parents culture. Her parents and extended family remain quite traditional in their expectations while the poet is embracing edgy openness. These poems follow the speaker navigating the misguided good intentions of those wanting to steer her along a path that she knows isn't right for her. Still, she humors them by meeting suitors for which she's completely unsuited. It's a quirky give and take of individuation and parental adaptation. 

I think a lot of young people, teens through mid-twenties, could relate to this book, especially if they are the children of immigrant parents. For me, an old lady no longer much interested in people's fraught movement into sexual maturity, I found it a mildly interesting and easy read. The last two poems struck me as having more complexity and I wouldn't hesitate to read another book by this poet as she moves on to other experiences and subject matter.

Lupine by Jenny Irish (2023) (30 pgs of poetry)

I was only a few pages into this chapbook before deciding it wasn't for me. It was partly due to negative serendipity. I'd already read two caps featuring violence against women. Lupine seemed to be rounding up all sorts of violence, connecting them all. I just wasn't up for another read of that kind. 

But there was also the issue of whether what I was reading was actually poetry or a set of related mini essays. I've read a lot of prose poetry but haven't yet been able to articulate for myself, or anyone else, what the line between poetry and prose (flash essay or creative nonfiction) is. I'm not interested in coming up with some hard and fast rule but I feel I should be able to explain why when I feel something purporting to be prose poetry doesn't strike me as poetry. Alas, I still haven't hit on it, but this work didn't strike me as poetry.

Sarabande Books:

Lucy by Jean Valentine (2009) (17 pgs of poetry)

This slender collection of poetry is inspired by the skeleton unearthed by paleontologists in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974, which is believed to be approximately 3.2 million years old. At the time of the publication of this chapbook, this skeleton, dubbed Lucy by a member of the original expedition, was still the oldest and most complete hominid skeleton. There's a note to this effect at the beginning of this book and an image of the skeleton graces the cover.

For those of us who have been Lucy admirers for a long time, this book's focus is irresistible. Seeing it made me wonder if there are enough Lucy tributes by poets to assemble an anthology. But until such an anthology is created we have this one poet's response to Lucy. 

To say that the poetry itself is spare would perhaps be unfair; however, the tone is careful, at times verging on reverent. It is not effusive. Valentine contemplates the bones as a type of "secret book" Lucy has left us. I would recommend reading the notes at the back as a form of introduction to the types of associations Valentine is about to embark on: Looking at Lucy as the first to have lived and the first to have died, having been dredged up from the earth but also named after the song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and having shown up now, creating an arc over human history.

The book starts without titles and no indication whether page divisions are separate poems (I suspect they are) or if it's supposed to be one long poem. Perhaps this is like finding the bones. On page 10 we get a title and for the remaining 10 pages I assume we have all titled poems with new stanzas being given a new page if they won't fit on the preceding page without breaking up the stanza.

Perhaps I'm writing so much about this book in hopes of connecting with it. The truth is I was disappointed. Valentine has her own associations and romanticizing regarding Lucy and hers don't quite jibe with mine. To me, Valentine leaves Lucy in the realm of abstraction, even in deifying her as a representation of the great mother. There's nothing warm in this collection.

The City of Poetry by Gregory Orr (2012) (32 pgs of poetry)

I would never have thought I'd be describing Gregory Orr's poetry as charming but I'm doing just that here. This chapbook is for people who love poetry. In it each poet has a house and each poem is a house and the city that's created is life-sustaining. He lights on important encounters with poets and poetry from his own life so the mood is also nostalgic. Orr takes us on a sort of tour of the city and some of its residents in short interludes, a stanza or short poem. Of all the chaps I've read from this set, this is the one I want to keep. It makes me want to write about my own city of poetry. After all, each inhabitant of a city sees it differently, meets different people, appreciates different architecture, uses different avenues or alley to get from here to there. Each poetry lover has their own City of Poetry. I'm charmed that Orr has shared his with me through this book.

Foundlings Press:

My Radar Data Knows Its Thing by Lytton Smith (25 pgs of poetry)

This is an interesting chapbook with a couple of up front motifs. The first is that of radar. The table of contents is created in the bulls-eye configuration of a radar screen and the marking of a thing as near or far as on radar occurs in the poems. The second is the phrase from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (note the last name is the first name of the poet) "It was a dark and stormy night." This sentence is incorporated into the beginning of almost every poem in the book. In addition, a portrait of E. Bulwer-Lytton is reproduced throughout the book with various distortions made to it that relate obliquely to the poems. There's a section where there are 4 poems that are simply the scrambling of the lines in the first poem of the set and the lines simply don't have enough interest to bare that much remixing and repeating. The poetry is prose poetry and poetry of longer lines. So it's a very conceptual book. It was an interesting read but I'm afraid my main takeaway is that it's a series of poems that started with the sentence "It was a dark and stormy night" and since that line isn't original to the poet, it rather obscures the reputation of the poet behind an iconic popular sentence rather than leaving his own mark.

The following came together as the Spring 2021 Pack of Strays:

Mary Ruefle (Strays) (15 pgs of poetry)

Ruefle has a note in the back of this little booklet telling us that this is in fact a book of strays. They're poems of hers from years unmarked that have never made it into any collection of her poetry. Stray though they are, they lean toward the surreal and toward Asian influences. I've only read bits of her work in anthologies and journals so I don't know if those two things are characteristic of her work in general. 

The format of this booklet is too big for many purses but the poems therein are curious enough to suit re-reading and mulling while waiting at the doctor's office. I could see removing pages and keeping them folded up in some purse pocket or wallet for future contemplation and when done with them inserting them surreptitiously into library books to baffle the next unsuspecting readers.

Julianne Neely (Stray Selfies) (33 pgs of poetry)

If you like cheeky modernism, you may enjoy this book of poems, the titles of which all have the word selfie in them somewhere. As one would expect in poetry harkening to the moderns, there's a lot of disruption of meaning and throwing convention to the wind. One of the poems uses morse code as the beginning of every line (no, I didn't decode it nor are we provided with a decoded version). There's a poem that's a simple geometric shape with a comment on it. There's a poem with footnotes. There are blocks of repeating text. Backslashes are used for different purposes in different poems. And there's one long block of prose poem that I didn't feel the need to finish. There was another four and a half page poem that I didn't finish (my interest didn't see me through the disruption) and another one that I almost didn't finish because the metaphor (taxidermy) was distasteful to me. However, again, if you like cheeky modernism, and I do, this is worth a read. I'm sure there are subtleties I missed (because there always are). It's good to see a poet using conceptual freedom of the modernists to probe today's ubiquitous technologies and the new cultural phenomenon they engender.

Rachelle Toarmino (Comeback: A Crown of Sonnets in Prose) (10 pgs of poetry)

This is a powerful set of poems contemplating being a survivor. The poems approach the subject generally and then move toward the speakers personal survival after an assault. 

It's good to keep in mind that "Comeback" has at least two meanings: a retort, especially to an insult; to recover from a setback. I think both apply to these poems. This is a set of poems I'm tempted to slip into a domestic violence shelter. It's a combination of abstraction of something very personal, truth-telling, and empowerment.

Though I see how these prose poems are sonnets (little songs) and all follow a theme, I did not see how they formed a crown, which normally would involve repetition of lines or phrases from one sonnet to the next. Does this invalidate it being a crown? No. Not in a world where almost any 14 line poem can be called a sonnet regardless of whether it follows any of the conventions. Toarmino does directly address the notion of a "turn" in more than one of these poems so she clearly has the history of the form in mind and I'm sure if playing off of it in more ways than I'm likely to catch on a first reading.

Of these three strays, this is the one that impresses me the most.