Annal:1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry winner
- Score: 30.48
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who “sounds like nobody else.”
Desire: Poems
- 1998 Bobbitt Prize winner
- 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 1997 NBA–Poetry finalist
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 28.48
I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.—from “Catullus: Excrucior”
In Frank Bidart’s collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first half contains some of Bidart’s most luminous and intimate work-poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus). The second half of the book exts the overt lyricism of the opening section into even more ambitious territory-”The Second Hour of the Night” may be…
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
Loose Sugar is an alchemical manuscript disguised as a collection of poems, or vice versa. Either way, the primal materials of which this book is comprised—love, sex, adolescence, space-time, depression, post-colonialism, and sugar—are movingly and mysteriously transmuted: not into gold, but into a poet’s philosopher’s stone, in which language marries life.
Structurally virtuosic, elaborate without being ornate, Loose Sugar is spun into series within series: each of the five sections has a dual heading (such as “space / time” or “time / work”) in which…
Questions for Ecclesiastes: Poems
- 1998 Lenore Marshall winner
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.48
The relationship between God and humankind is more troubling and urgent than ever. Questions for Ecclesiastes, especially the “20 Unholy Sonnets”, handles problems of religious faith in fresh ways. They explore the parallels between family life and sacred myth, and attempt to revive the personal, devotional address to God.
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
Does Your House Have Lions? explores the life of Sonia Sanchez’s brother—a vibrant young man who left the South for New York, immersed himself in the city’s gay subculture, and became a victim of AIDS in the first years of the pandemic. Sanchez describes her brother’s alienation from his family and his illness and death from AIDS with her characteristic tenderness. Told in the voices of sister, brother, father, mother, and ancestors, it is the story of kin estranged and then finally brought together by their shared history of loss, separation, and pain.…
