2023 National Book Award for Poetry
The National Book Foundation has released the winner of for this year's annual National Book Award for Poetry. See the winner and all the finalists including Monica Youn, who was a finalist in 2010, John Lee Clark, nominated for his collection focused on the mundane pains and joys of life, and Evie Shockley who pays homage to Black feminist visionaries. This list includes the winner, the finalists and the longlisters including a brief description of each book from the foundation.
10 books
![Book Cover for: From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot], Craig Santos Perez](https://d16057n354qyo4.cloudfront.net/9781632431189.jpg?nextExtension=webp&version=1709848900)
Winner
Chris Spaide
From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot]
Craig Santos PerezWinner: "from unincorporated territory [åmot] is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez’s ongoing series dedicated to the history of his homeland and the culture of the indigenous Chamoru people from the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam). Through experimental poems, Perez observes and asserts storytelling as an act of resistance—a written form of “åmot,” the Chamoru word for “medicine”—that champions decolonization, demilitarization, and environmental justice."
Chris SpaidePaperback, 2023
$22.95$11.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
How to Communicate: Poems
John Lee ClarkFinalist: "John Lee Clark’s How to Communicate considers the small joys and pains of life, and the endless possibilities of language through poems influenced by the Braille slate and translated from American Sign Language and Protactile, a language used by DeafBlind people that’s rooted in touch. The result is an inventive and human exploration on the power of tactility and of poetry."
Danez & National Book Critics CircleHardcover, 2022
$26.95$13.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Suddenly We
Evie ShockleyFinalist: "Evie Shockley plays with visuals, sounds, and poetic form to pay homage to Black feminist visionaries, both living and departed in her collection suddenly we. Shockley asks readers to envision a more balanced relationship between inner self and outer community, and ultimately, a more expansive definition of the collective 'we.'"
cph & Alina StefanescuPaperback, 2023
$15.95$7.97 + Free shipping50% off your first book
From from: Poems
Monica YounFinalist: "Monica Youn offers a piercing examination of America’s obsession with what it considers “other” in her latest collection, From From. Through poetry and personal essays, Youn manipulates technique and subject—from Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons and Proust to the television show Fresh Off the Boat and Greek mythology—to confront American racism and anti-Asian violence and reflect back the question of “where are you from from” onto its readers."
Los Angeles Review of Books & Ada LimónPaperback, 2023
$17.00$8.50 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Tripas: Poems
Brandon SomFinalist: "Tripas celebrates Brandon Som’s upbringing in a multicultural, multigenerational home—honoring his Chinese American father who ran the family corner store and his Mexican Nana who worked on the assembly line at Motorola. Som’s poems traverse languages, cultures, and borders, connecting his family histories and heritages in a conversation about migration, labor, and memory."
Stephanie Burt (also elsewhere) & London Review of BooksPaperback, 2023
$20.95$10.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
The Diaspora Sonnets
Oliver de la PazLonglist: "In The Diaspora Sonnets, Oliver de la Paz chronicles his family’s search for a home in the US after leaving the Philippines in 1972. The reader travels from coast to coast alongside de la Paz’s uprooted family, as the sonnets themselves become homes for belonging, longing, and displacement."
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers & Poetry DailyHardcover, 2023
$26.95$13.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
West: A Translation
Paisley RekdalLonglist: "West: A Translation is a hybrid collection of poems and lyric essays inspired by an anonymous carving at a detention center in San Francisco eulogizing a Chinese migrant who died there by suicide. Informed by historical artifacts and her own family’s history, Rekdal presents a translation of the anonymous poem followed by “notes” that contextualize the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, built during the Chinese Exclusion Act."
Los Angeles Review of Books & Dr. Maya C. PopaPaperback, 2023
$26.00$13.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Promises of Gold
José OlivarezLonglist: "Promises of Gold positions love—cultural, familial, platonic, and for one’s self—as a hopeful and healing anecdote to intergenerational trauma. José Olivarez reflects on his experience as the son of Mexican immigrants and the slipperiness of the American Dream in this collection, which includes a complete translation from the original English into Spanish by poet David Ruano González."
Nicole Chung | @nicolechung on Bluesky & DanezHardcover, 2023
$24.99$12.49 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Trace Evidence: Poems
Charif ShanahanLonglist: "In Trace Evidence, Charif Shanahan examines his queer, mixed-race identity and the legacies of anti-Blackness and colonialism in the US and abroad. At the core of Shanahan’s collection is a poem about a catastrophic bus accident he survived during a trip to his mother’s native Morocco. Across three distinct sections, Shanahan contends with erasure, mortality, and against all odds, living."
Los Angeles Review of Books & Tin HousePaperback, 2023
$16.95$8.48 + Free shipping50% off your first book
Vexations
Annelyse GelmanLonglist: "Annelyse Gelman’s book-length poem Vexations—titled and structured after Erik Satie’s 19th-century piano score of the same name—follows a mother and daughter traveling through a dystopian world where the contagion at hand affects human empathy. Vexations embodies both speculative fiction and call- to-action across a sonic, cinematic soundscape."
Victoria Chang & elvia wilkPaperback, 2023
$18.00$9.00 + Free shipping50% off your first book