Books in the National Poetry series

"A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency"--

"Ask the Brindled, selected by Rick Barot as a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series, bares everything that breaks between "seed" and "summit" of a life-the body, a people, their language. It is an intergenerational reclamation of the narratives foisted upon Indigenous and queer Hawaiians-and it does not let readers look away"--

Poetry. Winner of the 1991 American Book Award and the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award. "Selected by Denise Levertov for the National Poetry Series, this generally strong first collection, often set in the San Francisco Bay Area or in the wilderness, showcases Centolella's gift for finding wonder in the quotidian, for recovering 'the taken-for-granted.' In 'Task, ' the poet writes, 'It's not a savior the world needs / but a savoring spirit, a way to relish what's already / begun to vanish, ' and his best work celebrates the beauty, evanescence and inevitable grief of mortal life. An elegy for his Lebanese grandmother, 'Sito, ' is especially moving, as is 'Ossi dei morti' (bones of the dead), about the Italian sweet so named: 'It's dark and bittersweet, / this chocolate marrow, this brief time / people call a life. We bite into it / hard. We do this together. / A local cure for sorrow.' At their least interesting, the poems suffer from pedestrianism and an abrupt, gunshot style--e.g., in 'The Garden': 'The closer to terra firma one is / the more firma one feels. After a long hike, I stink, / therefore I am'"--Publishers Weekly.

This fourth collection from the author of the prose masterpiece The Meadow is inspired by the often harsh subrural landscape of southwestern Wyoming where Galvin has spent most of the past decade building a log home, beginning with the felling of trees. Firsthand knowledge of the expansive landscape of the west provides perspective more than mere imagery, reducing human activity to its proper dimension. Galvin adds a kind of pre-Socratic intelligence, a stoical turn of mind, and genuine love of hard physical work to make poems that are direct, spare, compact, and stripped of rhetorical or aesthetic device.

Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, Terry Ehret's first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign element, walking "the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life", taking the reader into myth memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of ancient hieroglyphic text. If H. D. had been a language poet, she might have written something like this.