POETRY
‘frank: sonnets’ by Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)
Seuss has said that this collection, her fifth, is a memoir of sonnets, containing poems about death, birth, loss and addiction. “Death does not exist in poetry,” begins one piece. “No suffocating sounds in poems, no smell of blood. I can describe / the sounds, the smells, but description is in fact a shelter. There is no nobility / in description. Is there nobility in poems? Let’s hope not. Nobility is another place / to hide.” The collection also won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award.
finalist: “Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten”, by Will Alexander (New Directions)
DailyExpertNews described Alexander as a poet who “mixes politics with hypnotic, oracular lines.” This collection consists of three long poems.
finalist: “Yellow Rain”, by Mai Der Vang (Graywolf Press)
A poetic account of mysterious illnesses and deaths among the Hmong people, many of whom believed that a substance known as ‘yellow rain’ was dropped from airplanes beginning in the 1970s, leading to accusations of biological warfare.
GENERAL NON-FICTION
In ‘Invisible Child’, Elliott builds on her 2013 series for The Times about Dasani, a homeless schoolgirl from New York, and her family. An intimate account of the family, it is also a poignant account of poverty and addiction, and of the city’s and country’s repeated failures to address these issues. In the Book Review podcast, Elliott said that Dasani became the main focus of the book, in part because “she was someone who, at a very young age, was able to articulate her experience in a moving and profound way. And that is a rare trait even in adults.” In his review, Matthew Desmond wrote, “The result of this unwavering, tenacious coverage is a rare and powerful work whose stories remain in your life long after you’ve read them.”
finalist: “The Family Roe: An American Story”, by Joshua Prager (WW Norton & Company)
Perhaps the most current of this year’s winners and finalists, Joshua Prager’s book is the story of Norma McCorvey, the accuser known as Jane Roe, whose case won abortion rights for American women. In his review, Anand Giridharadas wrote that in Prager’s narration, “Jane Roe is both heroine and villain – and a paragon of human complexity. If you love your stories as too many of us do now – knock, with the story reverse engineered.” to validate your past experiences – then this book is not for you, but it is if you want to take an honest look at the American soul, into the dirty and sometimes fruitful marriage of activism and commerce, into the ways people can do contradictory things being and believing, in the inner and outer lives of women oppressed and discarded by reproductive tyranny.”
