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This week, the National Book Foundation is unveiling the longlists for its literary prizes. 

Both new voices and award-winning writers made the cut. Their poetry reaches all the way back to Babylon, and all the way forward to the unknown future.

Many of the publishing houses behind the collections are based in New York, but smaller presses from Pittsburgh, Massachusetts and Minneapolis are also in the mix.

The finalists will be announced Oct. 14, and the winner will be announced on Nov. 18.

National Book Award Young People's Literature longlist

"Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude" by Ross Gay


Gay's book is meditation on what goes away, from loved ones to the seasons. Booklist called the collection "accessible, alive poems that give one the sense of sitting and talking in the poet's kitchen."


Gerstler draws inspiration from 1950s recipes and diagnostic tests for Alzheimer's and Walter Benjamin's writings about his drug experiences. The Washington Post said her poetry  "mixes salty humor, invigorating rhythms and sharp-edged wisdom."


This career collection draws from two decades of Hacker's poetry and includes 25 new works, which take place in cafes, refugee camps and other locales.


Hayes' background as a visual artist comes through in this, his fifth collection of poetry. "How to Be Drawn" explores how we see and how we are seen. The New Yorker said Hayes' "poems are like a Pixar version of the mental marionette show, a dazzling space crammed with comic jabs."


For Hirshfield, the beauty is in the details. Her collection takes everyday things — a skeleton, a cork board, the weather — and spins them into points of fascination. 

"Voyage of the Sable Venus" by Robin Coste Lewis


Lewis' debut collection meditates on the black female figure and how it has been perceived and portrayed through time.  


How does the self change? How does it change when you find a new home? When you age? When you fall in love? And how does it stay the same? Limón explores the shifting self in a collection that the Los Angeles Review of Books called it her "most gorgeous book of poems."

"Elegy for a Broken Machine" by Patrick Phillips


Phillips circles around fatherhood, writing about his own father and observing his sons. His poetry takes readers from childhood to the unexpected joys of middle age.


Phillips' poetry reaches out to Dante's "Paradise" and Homer's "The Iliad," while jumping from Colorado to Florida, and from humor to heartbreak.

"Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts" by Lawrence Raab


Poet Tony Hoagland warns of Raab: "His poems lead you into, then trap you, in strange worlds, boxes constructed of story, logic, and aphorism, which then are revealed to be exactly like life itself."

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Tracy Mumford

Author

New voices and award-winning writers made the cut for the National Book Foundation's poetry prize longlist.

2015 National Book Awards: Poetry

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