Well, it looks as if this week on PennSound Daily is all about bestowing congratulations, with a trio of PennSound poets having been announced this week as being on the long-list for this year's National Book Award in Poetry. That includes one repeat nominee, Forrest Gander, and a pair of exciting poets getting the nod for the first time: Douglas Kearney and Hoa Nguyen.
Gander is nominated for Twice Alive, which "addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world." "Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions," the summary contines, "Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations." PennSound's Forrest Gander author page is home to readings and interviews from 1992 to the present year.
Kearney is nominated for Sho, which "eschew[s] performative typography [and] aims to hit crooked licks with straight-seeming sticks." This collection "navigat[es] the complex penetrability of language, while espous[ing] Black vernacular strategies" and "examining histories and current events through the lyric, brand new dances, and other performances," creating "a genius work of literary precision, wordplay, farce, and critical irony." PennSound's relatively-new Douglas Kearney author page is where you can find a handful of readings from 2005 to the present, along with an illuminating appearance on Charles Bernstein's Close Listening program from 2018.
Last but certainly not least, Nguyen is nominated for A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure, "a poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-'Fall-of-Saigon' with verse biography on the poet's mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe." This haunting collection "sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts." Our Hoa Nguyen author page houses a quartet of readings spanning the years 2010 to 2017.
We send our heartiest congratulations to these three poets and the other seven on this year's long-list. Like many of our listeners, we'll be excitedly waiting to see who makes the final list and eventually is awarded the prize.
