Annal:2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems
- 2004 Bobbitt Prize winner
- 2002 NBCC–Poetry winner
- Score: 20.54
B. H. Fairchild’s memory systems are the collective vision of America’s despairing dreamers—failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.
- 2002 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 2002 NBA–Poetry finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 18.52
Harryette Mullen’s fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet’s most seductive writing partners, Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and…
- 2002 NBA–Poetry finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.52
From Sharon Olds—a stunning new collection of poems that project a fresh spirit, a startling energy of language and counterpoint, and a moving, elegiac tone shot through with humor.
From poems that erupt out of history and childhood to those that embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love, Sharon Olds takes risks, writing boldly of physical, emotional, and spiritual sensations that are seldom the stuff of poetry.
These are poems that strike for the heart, as Sharon Olds captures our imagination with…
Without End: New and Selected Poems
- 2002 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.52
The best work of one of Poland’s greatest younger poets
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he’s been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part
almost without end.
—from “On Swimming”
This selection draws from Adam Zagajewski’s English-language collections, both in and out of print; it also includes work from his early books, Communiqué and Butcher Shop, as well as…
