2024 National Book Award Longlist in Poetry

In The Book of Wounded Sparrows, his second full-length collection of poetry, Octavio Quintanilla sifts through the wreckage left in the pursuit of the American Dream. This is a book within a book, a memory within a memory, a future within a past, and most urgently--a journey to reclaim the self for what it was and to proclaim what it could be. Nested within one another, the English and Spanish, the poetry and art, create layers of obscuration and revelation, unburying the fractured landscapes left in the wake of geographic, emotional, and familial dislocation.

In this collection, Quintanilla finds the language and the form to write about the loss that often happens when one migrates from one country to another: the loss of family, the loss of culture, and the loss of language. Of course, this book is more than that--more than a narrative of loss--it is a book of poetic reclamation, of poetic imagination, of finding new and interesting ways to tell a story, a love of language at its center, so as to reclaim a history of trauma and mythologize the self.

Lady without Land is a story told in fragments about señorita who feels lost in and lost without Los Angeles. She uses classic literature and cocktail recipes to organize and populate bits and pieces of a life: growing up as a Mexican middle-class girl in a predominantly white suburb where neighbors labeled her family the dirty Mexicans; being bullied by an older sister on car rides from Los Angeles to Mexico, grappling with a father's gambling addiction, and, later, his death; journeying on the continuous carousel of lovers the Pacific and Atlantic coasts have to offer. A shaken and stirred abecedarian, a sloppy yet put-together künstlerroman, about charting one's life path amid cultural pressures and the grip of the ever-present past, the book can be read forwards or backwards and, with any hope, completely out of sequence so that no reader can read this novel the same way twice.

What does it mean to be in a place and out of place at the same time? Gabrielle Civil explores this question by making black feminist performance art in Mexico. She asks unsuspecting Mexicans if they have good hair, visits legendary black expatriate artist Elizabeth Catlett, celebrates Obama's first election with mariachis, embarks on love affairs, dresses up as a Mexican doll, and christens herself with Negrita rum. Archiving her 2008-2009 Fulbright fellowship project, In and Out of Place combines diary entries, images, performance texts, critical commentary, and current reflections. Civil explores--and expands--the parameters of her own body, artistic process, heritage, and culture. She retraces--and activates--her trajectory as a black woman artist in the world.
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Innovative Prose

...

from de donde eres ?
where are you from?
and why are you wearing a sombrero?
are you trying to go native?
are you staking a claim?
are you playing a part or a joke?
who are you here, black girl?
who do you think you are?
what gifts are you bringing?
what rights do you have?
who are your people
and where are they now?
why is your accent so funny?
what are you trying to say?
when did you get here?
how long will you stay?
what lines are you drawing?
what are you rendering?
what do you recall?

Set on a remote island on the Maine coast, GHOST:: SEEDS incorporates elements of magical realism and myth to explore and trouble conceptions of gender and identity. The central tension of this book-length poem is a dialogue between a trans speaker and his ghost, the girl-ghost of the self that he left behind to become the man he is today. Putting a queer spin on the myth of Persephone, the girl-ghost speaks from underworld lit by glowworms, cut through by dark rivers, and connected to the world above through a sea cave. Alternating between prose-like elements and lyric meditations, the book's expansive form makes full use of the page from margin to margin, creating space and breathing room for complicated investigations of memory, gender, and grief.

...
From Remember the first time

Remember the first time we realized
we could choose our own name?

The name that would become my name?

In college, we played with gender in the theater,
acted as Sebastian in Twelfth Night.

One night, after rehearsal, we told our friends,

Call me Sebastian, even when I'm not on the stage.

Over ten years since we found my name,
I'm still learning myself:

I grow my hair long for the first time
since I abandoned you.

In The Book of Drought, Rob Carney skips ahead to the ending, setting his unnamed Listen-Recorder in a near-future landscape newly wrecked by drought. Instead of water: dead lakebeds. Instead of wild animals: bones. The sky is now cloudless, and the city's faucets are dry. No one has adjusted yet, but some gather in an empty river to grieve, remember, and to tell their stories, the stories that become this book. Part dystopian warning, part dry-humor protest, part mythology and song--get ready for some sad-mad beauty, but with open-eyed hope.

Winner of the 2023 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, selected by Richard Blanco

Winner of The 2024 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, selected by Carolyn Hembree

6 Lineage Poems is a debut poetry collection rooted in the body and the world. Half the collection is lush and evocative, lingering in the sensuous. The other half sits in stillness and calm. There are poems that embody old lovers while looking forward to new ones, and there are poems that sit back to observe a lake, garden, or the sky. All in all, this collection is a little offering for the altar of poetic lineage, and it calls on poets from Li Bai to Megan Fernandes. Make of me a song, Trujillo states and implores. And make of himself a song, he does.

Sisters Kim and Kathy Hodges are born sixteen months apart in a middle-class existence parented by Linda and David Hodges of Houston, Texas. The happy couple welcomes their lucky daughter Kim, who is physically and mentally advanced. Following several miscarriages, Linda delivers unlucky Kathy at twenty-nine weeks, ensuring a life of cognitive and physical disabilities. Kathy enters public school as a special education student, while Kim is recognized as gifted.

Both sisters face life and death decisions as Houston is caught in the rip current of Hurricane Harvey. Kim learns the capricious nature of luck, while Kathy continues to make her own luck, surviving Hurricane Harvey, as she has survived all undertows with the ethereal courage of the resolute.

Sisters of the Undertow examines the connotations of lucky and unlucky, the complexities of sibling rivalry, and the hand fate delivers without reason.

from Young Memoir

di-as-po-ra
is silent. is spiritual. It is being robbed of memoir while you sleep in a suburb. it is nonconsensually sensual--it is a question. when it comes for you, what will you recover? what will you do to reclaim all that was forced lost?

A bleak and humorous literary novel about a scientist with synesthesia who invents an artificial fragrance to reproduce the silence of the smell of his dead mother. When Denise, his coworker, unwittingly inhales the fragrance, she must fight to stop a flood of hallucinatory artificial memories that threaten to destroy her identity. The novel explores a sad future (or the worst version of our present) in which human experience is mediated almost entirely through photographs and a few individuals who fight to live in the real.

Set in a rural agricultural community in north Alabama, deep in the Appalachian foothills, What Good is Heaven interrogates the complicated relationship between violence and love. Viewed through the lens of a young, bisexual woman, the poems in this collection layer a queer coming-of-age narrative with poems of witness to the difficult realities not only of rural and farm life, but of violent cultural norms based around the patriarchal religious beliefs that the region is steeped in. Like the social setting of this place, the landscape, with its dark forests and darker hollers, is a space of turbulence--of ideas butting up against each other--and those in the middle are left to sort out the wreckage. This collection is concerned with navigating that wreckage, which predominantly manifests as violence done to bodies. For the speaker of these poems, the bodily harm done to livestock and wild animals, plant life, and even the earth itself as simply part of the justifiable or acceptable violence of farm life comes to mirror the mirror the bodily transgression queer folks and women face in her community--violence that is similarly considered to be acceptable. In registers that move between the religious, personal, political, and even ecocritical, What Good is Heaven asks what it means to love and be loved by what hurts you, to be implicated in perpetuating the same kinds of harm, and what it means to call such a complicated place your home.

The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Alabama

First there is a door, and it goes knock-knock. Who's there? Lily Hoàng's A Knock at the Door peeps through a tiny, distorted keyhole, and on the other side, fairy tales wait--with patience, with malice, with magic.

Part of the Innovative Prose series, edited by Katie Jean Shinkle

The story is told through the eyes of Cortina's son, El Johnny, who bears witness to his father's cocaine-fueled transformation from devoted head of family to self-destructive head of a criminal organization that is rife with betrayal and deceit.

Anyone who wants to understand the tragedy of modern-day Mexico and America's complicity in the Mexican drug wars will want to read Mariguano, a novel that recalls classic crime narratives such as Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguys or William S. Burroughs's Junky but also reads like the work of the best Mexican and Latin American novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

When Buck Metzger's childhood is interrupted by the disappearance of his grandfather, several family members and close friends plot revenge on the suspected killer. From remote towns in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to the Texas/Mexico border, to war-torn Bosnia, Metzger struggles for self-identity and resolution in a world of blue-collar ethics and liquor-fueled violence.

Poet Suzanne Cleary, author of Crude Angel, says this about Elizabeth Burk's new poetry collection, Unmoored is both existentially serious and massively entertaining. It is arranged loosely in the form of a memoir--as a New Yorker who married a Cajun, Burk lives part-time in southwest Louisiana and has published two chapbooks describing this experience, Learning to Love Louisiana and Louisiana Purchase. This new collection includes many poems from these chapbooks as well as new poems that focus on aging--on getting through the last stretch of life with grace and humor. Burk has compiled her work into a poetic memoir of a life well-lived and well-examined for all of its eccentricities and triumphs. Undoubtedly, Unmoored can be counted among the latter.

Set in rural Michigan, tether & lung embraces a level of honest sensuality and vulnerability as a heterosexual woman grapples with the needs of her own body while her closeted homosexual husband seeks solace in the animals he loves--his horses--directing the othering he feels within himself towards his wife and children. These poems probe the nature of relationships where emotional extremes are often held in tension and betrayals are not easily healed or resolved. Here, compassion and contempt face one another, asking difficult questions concerning gender, alienation, child-rearing, domestic violence, and divorce.

Proprioception tastes of a feral urgency to time, to presence, a need. The poems move through ideas of race, of fear, of sexuality, of life already lived in low-level terror now amplified, of the weight of responsibility, of the burdens of age--trying to find a way to breathe every day in a now permanent upset of an already shaky imbalance, to find new position in spaces erupting with old hate, old jealousies, old greeds.

When Faith Adiele realizes that she's forgotten the sound of her late grandmother's voice, she impulsively decides to make a film. The process reveals surprises like her mummi had a thick Finnish accent and blamed her terminal cancer on all the things I never said, moving inside me. Set against the backdrop of the Watergate hearings, Her Voice: Hänen Ääensä A Hybrid Memoir weaves together diary entries, home movies, ichthyology, Nordic and Pacific Northwest mythologies, and YouTube language lessons to examine the legacies of trauma, class, politics, and silence on women's creative lives.

Her Voice leaps playfully and poignantly across time, memory, and history, as well as between American pop-culture and multi-ethnic/racial experiences that reveal America as always hybrid. Knitting together gorgeous shards of written memoir and essayistic musings with playwriting's realistic dialog and fabulist DIY-collaged illustrations, Adiele's investigation of almost-forgotten voices and images re-embodies and reminds us of what matters.

When experienced together with Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies (released simultaneously as an innovative breakout performative, a supplemental yet stand-alone praxis that pushes the vision of Her Voice and the memoir genre over the brink ) the two books offer an innovative approach that goes beyond traditional memoir's conventions. In an America no longer satisfied with merely privileged authorized written texts, Adiele shows us that culture, like memoir, can be hybrid, inclusive, and multiple, and yes, can be (and is always) both personal and political.

Voice/Over: A Memoir Breakout in 7 Movies opens in the rural American west, following Faith Adiele's whimsical coming of age as the only multiracial girl in a Nordic immigrant family obsessed with movies and voting. Set on one particular infamous election day, the formally-inventive memoir plays with the screenplay form, casting family members as characters in iconic American movies. Striking visual collages establish her union organizer grandfather, Finland's reindeer battalions, James Bond, The Magnificent Seven, and others as unlikely models in Faith's quest for heroism, identity and the American dream.

When read together with Her Voice (released simultaneously) Voice/Over provides an innovative breakout performative, a supplemental yet stand-alone praxis that expands the vision of the memoir genre (against capital-H History and capital- T Truth) beyond the singular, breaking free of convention, inclusive of hybrid, multiple, always personal/political, and ever-expanding genre/s.

River Hymnal offers rivers as connective tissue binding Louisiana, Washington, and Florida together. Poems are set in all these locales, and their landscapes shape and contain different permeations of the poet's life and sensibilities. The book's themes of discovery and loss, progress and regress, future and past, are all rivers that the poems alchemize into a confluence of water that currents the poet continually around the next bend in his life and memory.