Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2024 - Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
- Sara M.
- Thursday, February 15
Collection
Check out a book from this list to fulfill the 2024 Broader Bookshelf prompt "Read a book by a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning author". These books were all awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2024 Reading Challenge. Find more lists here.
Versed
Published in 2009
A collection of poetry organized in two sections. The first section, "Versed," play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. The second section, "Dark Matter," alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as the author's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking.--From publisher description.
Ozone Journal
Published in 2015
"A sequel of sorts to "Ziggurat," published in the Phoenix Poets series in 2010, the title poem from "Ozone Journal" recounts the memory of the speaker's excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a TV journalist crew in 2009. The speaker "dreams back," as it were, to the 1980s, when, as a young man in his thirties and caring for a young daughter after a recent divorce, he is having to juggle both personal and cultural/historical complexities living as a single parent in Manhattan. The poems create a montage that has the feel of history as lived experience, with the speaker struggling with the nature of memory as the poems move constantly back and forth to the Syrian desert, the dissolution of his marriage, visits and conversations with a cousin dying of AIDS, and encounters with famous jazz producers at Columbia Records to discuss music. In this book, Peter Balakian aims at the bigger picture of humanity's history of atrocity and trauma, but through short vignettes grounded in everyday situations, and in particular times and places"--Publisher's info.
Half-light
Collected Poems 1965-2016
Published in 2017
"The collected poems of the award winning American poet Frank Bidart"-- Provided by publisher.
Be with
Published in 2018
"Drawing from his experience as a translator, Forrest Gander includes in the first, powerfully elegiac section a version of a poem by the Spanish mystical poet St. John of the Cross. He continues with a long multilingual poem examining the syncretic geological and cultural history of the U.S. border with Mexico. The poems of the third section--a moving transcription of Gander's efforts to address his mother dying of Alzheimer's--rise from the page like hymns, transforming slowly from reverence to revelation. Gander has been called one of our most formally restless poets, and these new poems express a characteristically tensile energy and, as one critic noted, "the most eclectic diction since Hart Crane" -- Provided by publisher.
The Wild Iris
Published in 1992
The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Gluck's first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized myth of contemporary family. Now in The Wild Iris, her most important and accomplished collection to date, ecstatic imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition, creating an impassioned polyphonic exchange among the god who "discloses/virtually nothing," human beings who "leave/signs of feeling/everywhere," and a garden where "whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice." The poems of this sequence see beyond mortality, the bitter discovery on which individuality depends. "To be one thing/is to be next to nothing," Gluck challenges the reader. "Is it enough/only to look inward?" A major poet redefines her task--its thematic obsessions, its stylistic signature--with each volume. Visionary, shrewd, intuitive--and at once cyclical and apocalyptic--The Wild Iris is not a repudiation but a confirmation, an audacious feat of psychic ventriloquism, a fiercely original record of the spirit's obsession with, and awe of, earth.
Olio
Published in 2016
"Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them,"--Amazon.com.
Stag's Leap
Poems
Published in 2012
A sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting.
Then the War
And Selected Poems, 2007-2020
Published in 2022
"Then the War sees Carl Phillips turn his sharp and subtle gaze inward, charting the changing landscapes of his life and work in a collection of new and selected poems"-- Provided by publisher.
Frank
Sonnets
Published in 2021
""The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without," Diane Seuss writes in this brilliant, candid work, her most personal collection to date. These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, from Seuss's working-class childhood in rural Michigan to the dangerous allures of New York City and back again. With sheer virtuosity, Seuss moves nimbly across thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, Christ and motherhood, showing us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have nothing left to spare. Like a series of cels on a filmstrip, frank: sonnets captures the magnitude of a life lived honestly, a restless search for some kind of "beauty or relief." Seuss is at the height of her powers, devastatingly astute, austere, and--in a word--frank."--Publisher's website.
Life on Mars
Poems
Published in 2011
A collection of poems in which Tracy K. Smith examines the discoveries, failures, and oddities of humans.
Native Guard
Published in 2007
These poems explore the complex memory of the American South, history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the ''Native Guard'', one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In the author's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. This collection is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as the author employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices. Interwoven are poems honoring her mother and recalling her fraught childhood; her parents' interracial marriage was still illegal in 1966 in Mississippi. This book is a narrative caught in the intersections of public and personal testament. As Rita Dove proclaimed, "Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft."