Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award Nominees and Finalists in Poetry

Frank Bidart’s latest collection, Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016, encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst.  Mai Der Vang’s Afterland recounts with devastating detail the Hmong exodus from Laos and the fate of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities investigates inherited forms of love and family—all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives. Leslie Harrison’s The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with, absence. In Magdalene, Marie Howe imagines the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene as spiritual, sensual, and searching for meaning in a contemporary landscape. In Shane McCrae’s In the Language of My Captor historical persona poems and a prose memoir address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead confronts America— where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes.

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