A Quick Guide to the NBCC Poetry Longlist 2024

 For the first time, National Book Critics Circle is sharing its long lists for their annual awards,

Kenze Allen

including poetry. This year’s stellar works show the range and depth of United States poetry at this time in history. Please share with me these exciting works by reading about them and supporting the individuals and their presses by purchasing copies. I have some personal and quoted notes to share:

 An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon): Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned her MFA and PhD from the University of Virginia and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Other books are The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017). Her lines are taut, dramatic, progressions through multiple timelines. Her press writes, "Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.” 

Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen (Tin House): An Indigenous Nations Poets fellow of the first year, Kenzie’s debut book combines historical texts and lyric works to create response to her Haudenosaunee descendancy. She creates new forms to hold together the histories, maps, and emotions. Not to be missed. From her press: “Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.”  

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf (Nightboat): This native Iowan now lives in the Rockies. During Covid, he resided in Michigan, and, according to his press, “a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation.” His stand as a queer poet informs the works of change and chance.

A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon (University of Pittsburgh): Global travel informs this book of lyrics and the odd-side role of the commentator/poet on journeys outside “normal.”

Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat): This poet and essayist has established credentials plus is a professor at Bard. Her press describes the book: “Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system.”

The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian (Tin House). Another Tin House entry to the list Armen’s work is based on Iranian architecture. From his website: “In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.” I had a chance to talk with him about the book last spring, and I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—how we create structures in our personal and collective narratives. He is working on a Ph.D. at Stanford, and he is a poet I am following for his vision, for his connection of personal to collective destinies.

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This veteran poet has been a north star for over a generation. He has won the Pulitzer and written 17 books. His works demands respect for their solid and lyrical energy.

Sturge Town by Kwame Dawes (W. W. Norton): Kwame contributes to his communities by editing the African series of poetry for the University of Nebraska Press. This book returns to his native Jamaica, to one of the free towns founded after emancipation in Jamaica. Postcolonial life. Music traditions and visual art poems are threaded among the themes.

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions): Anne’s works are always perfectly balanced, inventive, and wise play with the language. About these prose poems the poet writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington (BOA): Originally a librarian, Janice Harrington turned to poetry in the 1990s. She writes about the Southern origins of her family and Black Americans in the Midwest. Critic Johnny Payne writes of this book: “As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”