From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Ordinary Words
Ruth Stone
Ordinary Words celebrates Ruth Stone’s 84th birthday.
Ordinary Words captures a unique vision of “Americana” marked by Stone’s characteristic wit, poignancy, and lyricism. The poet addresses the environment, poverty, and aging with fearless candor and surprising humor. “Stone’s subjects are trailer parks, state parks, prefab houses, school crossing guards, bears, snakes, hummingbirds, bottled water, Aunt Maud, Uncle Cal, lost love, dry humping at the Greyhound bus terminal, and McDonald’s as a refuge from loneliness. Her heroes are dead husbands, wild grandmothers, struggling daughters—ordinary Americans leading simple and extraordinary lives.
Diva
Rafael Campo, Federico Garcia Lorca
A major new work from one of America’s most acclaimed younger poets, Rafael Campo’s Diva appears at the intersection of confession and confinement, hyperbole and humility. In his masterful third collection, Campo explores further the epic themes of his Cuban heritage and America’s newness, his work as a doctor caring for AIDS patients and his identity as a gay man.
At once relishing and resisting the poetic traditions of formal English verse, Diva showcases Campo moving deftly between received forms and free verse. In each poem the sound of words is transformed into the highest of arts, the act of performance into the exercise of power, and the most profound abjection into the sweet promise of divinity. Culminating with his new and daring translations of Federico Garcia Lorca’s sonetos—the great Spanish poet’s most homoerotically explicit and formally accomplished poems—Campo’s music instills in the reader an exalted understanding of beauty, suffering, and, ultimately, the human capacity for empathy.
HIV, Mon Amour: Poems
Tory Dent
Tory Dent’s is a voice like no other. Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems,
What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as “immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death.” With
HIV, Mon Amour she moves further into the whirlwind—as witness, lover, and observer.
On the Bus With Rosa Parks: Poems
Rita Dove
A dazzling new collection by a much-celebrated former Poet Laureate of the United States. In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, “Cameos,” which probes the private griefs and dreams of a working-class family, to the emblematic grace of a living legend like Rosa Parks, who acquiesced to public life in order to “serve the public good,” these poems explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history. If there are heroes, Dove maintains, they continually reinvent themselves, as each of us must do every morning. As always with Rita Dove, there are stories —ghost tales and cautionary allegories (“The Camel Comes to Us from the Barbarians”), anecdotes and the historical moment reexamined (“The Enactment”). We get the lowdown nitty-gritty from a jitterbug queen (“Black on a Saturday Nightz”), eavesdrop on a child’s whisperings (“I Cut My Finger Once on Purpose”), and experience the awakening of a bored teenager to the…
Dailies & Rushes
Susan Kinsolving
Dailies and Rushes opens with the disappointment of a present not received: “And so / it’s been in all my words and hopes: / poems, the elusive gift, the microscope.” In the poems that follow, Susan Kinsolving holds a kind of microscope to the visible world, examining jellyfish, blossoms, animals, fruit. What she finds there, as often as not, is the self writ small: “We are collectors,” the poem “Dried Butterflies” announces, “gathering information, artifacts / icons of identification / glass-cased or closet-closed.” As poet, Kinsolving collects the…
