{"title":"2025 National Book Award Poetry FInalists","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis collection consists of the Longlist finalists for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry. The group consists of a remarkable and varied selection of the year's contemporary poetry. \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/2025-national-book-awards-longlist\"\u003eEnjoy more ore from The New Yorker announcment\u003c\/a\u003e or just stand by unitl the winners are announced on November 19th. \u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"death-does-not-end-at-the-sea","title":"Death Does Not End at the Sea","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eLonglisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWinner of the Raz\/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn Gbenga Adesina's groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter figures embarking on journeys haunted by history--a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin--to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the middle passage. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina's \u003ci\u003eDeath Does Not End at the Sea\u003c\/i\u003e explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant's brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.","brand":"Gbenga Adesina","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493088298,"sku":"9781496244772","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/death-does-not-end-at-the-sea-5652285.jpg?v=1762250598"},{"product_id":"new-economy","title":"New Economy","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist*\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe New Economy\u003c\/em\u003e memorializes the world's pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eA devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of \"Miss You\" poems opening a portal to all those we've lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi's latest collection, \u003cem\u003eThe New Economy\u003c\/em\u003e, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi's own figure is examined--investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence--those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. \"The days I don't kill myself are extraordinary\" one poems says. \"Why don't we have a name for it?\" Lyrical and unafraid, \u003cem\u003eThe New Economy\u003c\/em\u003e invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gabrielle Calvocoressi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493153834,"sku":"9781556597213","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/new-economy-1415713.jpg?v=1762250598"},{"product_id":"becoming-ghost-poetry","title":"Becoming Ghost: Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003e2025 National Book Award Finalist. Ms. Magazine's Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025 The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. The follow-up to her acclaimed poetry debut \u003cem\u003eSplit\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eBecoming Ghost\u003c\/em\u003e documents Cathy Linh Che's parents' experiences as refugees who escaped the Vietnam War and then were cast as extras in Francis Ford Coppola's film \u003cem\u003eApocalypse Now\u003c\/em\u003e, placing them at the margins of their own story. The poetry collection uses persona, speculation, and the golden shovel form as a means of moving Vietnamese voices from the periphery to the center. The speaker's disownment raises questions about the challenges of using parents as poetic subjects, telling familial stories to a broader public, and the meaning of forgiveness.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cathy Linh Che","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493219370,"sku":"9781668088920","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/becoming-ghost-poetry-7978253.jpg?v=1762250598"},{"product_id":"scorched-earth-poems","title":"Scorched Earth: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e2025 National Book Award Finalist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eT\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003ehe striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the \"beautiful, vulnerable, honest\" (Ross Gay, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author) \u003ci\u003eI Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDive between the borders of ruined and radical love with this lyrical poetry collection that explores topics as expansive as divorce, the first Black Bachelorette, and the art world. Stanzas shift between reverence to irreverence as they take us on a journey through institutional and historical pains alongside sensuality and queer, Black joys.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom a generational voice that \"earns a place among the pantheon of such emerging black poets as Eve L. Ewing, Nicole Sealey, and Airea D. Matthews\" (\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review), \u003ci\u003eScorched Earth\u003c\/i\u003e is a transcendent anthology for our times.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Tiana Clark","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493284906,"sku":"9781668052075","price":17.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/scorched-earth-poems-7738711.jpg?v=1762250597"},{"product_id":"death-of-the-first-idea-poems","title":"Death of the First Idea: Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD - From Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans\/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhen Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with\u003ci\u003e Boy with Thorn\u003c\/i\u003e, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. \"Call Rickey Laurentiis' stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,\" Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis's poetics--from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThen, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, \"New Orleans \/ As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically \/ As by the water, which is history, which slip \/ Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.\" With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. \"You see something in me,\" she writes, \"something grand, \/ Your very cowardice yearns for; you \/ Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, \/ It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly \/ Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, \u003ci\u003eDeath of the First Idea\u003c\/i\u003e probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.","brand":"Rickey Laurentiis","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493350442,"sku":"9780593802700","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/death-of-the-first-idea-poems-9588939.jpg?v=1762250598"},{"product_id":"cold-thief-place","title":"Cold Thief Place","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCold Thief Place\u003c\/i\u003e speaks of the experiences of an undocumented American, her parents who fled Communist China and found safety in fundamentalist Christianity, and how she tried to understand them and herself by way of confessional poems. \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis is a family story. It tells of a mother who fled an authoritarian government and turned that authoritarianism on to her children. Of a father who made a new life--three times on three different continents--and his sea voyage in between. Or what a daughter imagines of these events, as much as it's possible to truly know one's parents. The narrator, who is their daughter, grew up in difficult but very different circumstances, too: undocumented in the United States and was pressured into a green card marriage in order to live a \"normal life.\" \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eOne of the myths of America is that Americans are newly formed, defiant of authority, and free from old-world traditions. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis book speaks to dark side of this myth: of the legacies that my parents wished to escape but instead carried with them: their distrust of government and their desire for an authoritarianism similar to the kind they had fled. Individually, the poems attempt to understand the emotions surrounding these impulses, from the point of view of their daughter, who is herself displaced as an undocumented American--that is, a person who is not permitted to be American, and without a home country to return to.","brand":"Esther Lin","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493415978,"sku":"9781949944709","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/cold-thief-place-2606932.jpg?v=1762250597"},{"product_id":"stay-dead","title":"Stay Dead","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Longlist*\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIn \u003cem\u003eStay Dead\u003c\/em\u003e, Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe politics of labor and performance collide with comedy and tragedy in Natalie Shapero's fourth poetry collection, \u003cem\u003eStay Dead\u003c\/em\u003e. Shapero's unflinching poems explore theories of acting, discourses of survival, privacy and publicity, power and punchlines, and the language of despair. This work explores how \"your death place \/ is the birthplace you choose.\" With appearances by Claude Monet, Mark Rothko, Chris Burden, Studs Terkel, Anthony Bourdain, Gene Kelly, and others, Shapero investigates themes of method acting, abstract expressionism, and the production and commodification of intense expression and raw interiority. She offers sly examinations of labor and housing markets. She interrogates the influence of artists' material conditions on the work they produce and the culture they shape. With a cutting, sardonic voice, Shapero asks what it means to be a working artist under capitalism; which individuals are permitted earnest extensions of the self; and \"whether being born is worth it.\"","brand":"Natalie Shapero","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493481514,"sku":"9781556597121","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/stay-dead-2238280.jpg?v=1762250598"},{"product_id":"i-do-know-some-things","title":"I Do Know Some Things","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e*2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist*\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eI Do Know Some Things\u003c\/i\u003e is a brave book, both in content and method.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is brave to write about childhood scars and the heartbreak the dead leave behind. It is brave to reconfigure one's life in the aftermath of a stroke. Richard Siken presents these subjects directly, without ornament, and with nothing to hide behind, confronting the fact that he can no longer manipulate the constructions of form, or speak lies that tell the truth. In spite of these limitations, Siken chooses to write these poems and release them into a dangerous world. Each image, each sentence, is as direct as the American artist Jasper Johns's shooting targets. Each poem is like a small room in a house, a room where you will be punched in the throat. As he claws himself back into a self, into a body, Siken has written a book that is unsettling and autobiographical by necessity, and its seventy-seven prose poems invite the reader to risk a difficult intimacy in search of yet deeper truths.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Richard Siken","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493547050,"sku":"9781556596247","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/i-do-know-some-things-2233702.jpg?v=1762250597"},{"product_id":"intentions-of-thunder-new-and-selected-poems","title":"Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003e\"Patricia Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.\" --Danez Smith, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cb\u003eA collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a \"masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard\" (Poetry Foundation).\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Intentions of Thunder\u003c\/i\u003e gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith's decorated career. Here, Smith's poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry--all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows--and of Smith's necessary voice. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eLyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, \u003ci\u003eThe Intentions of Thunder \u003c\/i\u003estunningly explores the fullness of living. The inimitable poetry of Patricia Smith radiates in \u003ci\u003eThe Intentions of Thunder\u003c\/i\u003e--reaffirming Smith's place as one of the indispensable poets of our time.","brand":"Patricia Smith","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493612586,"sku":"9781668055724","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/intentions-of-thunder-new-and-selected-poems-5056438.jpg?v=1762250591"},{"product_id":"terror-counter","title":"Terror Counter","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTERROR COUNTER\u003c\/i\u003e is a debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages-interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical--constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life. \u003ci\u003eTERROR COUNTER\u003c\/i\u003e asks: where and how might a Palestinian subject escape the public consumption of American letters? And, ultimately, how can we continue to love each other amidst the endless terror of the colonial world?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fargo Nissim Tbakhi","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43797493678122,"sku":"9781646053797","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/terror-counter-3287564.jpg?v=1762250591"},{"product_id":"2025-national-book-award-short-list","title":"2025 National Book Award Finalist Bundle","description":"\u003cp\u003eEnjoy all five of the Short List Nominees in a single bundle and you will save over 15% off list price and get free shipping. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach 2025 National Book Award Short List nominee brings a richly realized voice to the reader. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome quotations and references for each book:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eI Do Know Some Things\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003ci\u003e\"I Do Know Some Things\u003c\/i\u003e is a brave book, both in content and method.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eScorched Earth: Poems\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe striking sophomore poetry collection from the award-winning author of the \"beautiful, vulnerable, honest\" (Ross Gay, New York Times bestselling author) I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eBecoming Ghost: Poetry\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eMs. Magazine's Best Poetry of 2024 and 2025 The long-awaited sophomore poetry collection by award-winning writer Cathy Linh Che, on familial estrangement, the Vietnam War, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eNew Economy\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe New Economy\u003c\/em\u003e memorializes the world's pleasures and perils told through the point of view of an aging, ungendered body. \u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003eA devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. \u003cstrong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIntentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA collection of the finest new and selected poems from one of the most groundbreaking voices in contemporary poetry, a \"masterful performer and poet of voices too little heard\" (Poetry Foundation).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Poetry Shop","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43820992462890,"sku":null,"price":109.98,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/2025-national-book-award-short-list-4308624.png?v=1762846832"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/2025-national-book-award.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}