From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1991. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
What Work Is: Poems
Philip Levine
If there is such a thing as a working man’s poet, then Philip Levine is it. Born into a blue-collar family in Detroit, Levine grew up amidst the steel mills and auto factories of Motor City. Laboring in the plants radicalized both Levine’s politics and his art; in early works such as
On the Edge and
Not This Pig, he explored the gritty despair of urban working-class life, a reality that has continued to run through his later poetry as well. In his 1991 National Book Award-winning
What Work Is, Levine revisits the scenes of his youth—only now…
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991
Adrienne Rich
“This is no place you ever knew me,” writes Adrienne Rich in her major new work, “…These are not the roads/you knew me by.” As always in her forty-year career, this major poet has mapped out new territory , astonishing and enlightening us with her penetrating insight into our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of our difficult world.
Eva-Mary
Linda McCarriston
“This is an immensely moving book, fearless in its passion. Linda McCarriston accomplishes a near miracle, transforming memories of trauma into poems that are luminous and often sacramental, arriving at a hard-won peace.” —Lisel Mueller
The Homeplace
Marilyn Nelson Waniek
Marilyn Nelson Waniek is a teller of family tales whose black roots in the South quickly embrace us all. Maybe best, Waniek has the full range of a blues singer’s passion, from bitterness to joy, and she shows why in the right hands poetry’s cry of the heart is still strong and still fresh.
