The Millions: Incendiary Art: Poems (Triquarterly Books) by Patricia Smith

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The Pulitzer jury named Andrew Sean Greer’s Less this year’s winner in the fiction category.

Here are this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists with bonus links:

Fiction:

Winner: Less by Andrew Sean Greer
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (read not one, but two Millions’ reviews)

General Nonfiction:

Winner: Locking Up Our Own by James Foreman Jr.
Notes on a Foreign Country by Suzy Hansen
The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum

History:

Winner: The Gulf:The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis
Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics by Kim Phillips-Fein
Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross

Biography or Autobiography:

Winner: Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser
Richard Nixon: The Life by John A. Farrell
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

Poetry:

Winner: Half-light by Frank Bidart (Read about the poet IRL)
semiautomatic by Evie Shockley
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith (Our interview with Smith)

Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer Web site.

Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar

It’s been a long 2017. So much of being a poet as I understand it is about maintaining a permeability to wonder, and that’s been difficult work in a year spent in the long shadow of a fascistic regime, a year in which the earth has grown increasingly desperate in its attempts to warn us about the damage we’re doing to it.

The (perhaps feeble ((but noble))) balm—a year of books, richer than any I can recall. It’s like the world of poetry knew we’d need it to rise up and carry us, to orient us toward our livable tomorrows. Poets are watchers, wonderers. And they have the magical ability to make us realer than we can make ourselves. Elizabeth Alexander writes: “We are of interest to one another, are we not?” I like thinking of poems as little empathy tablets, granting us access to (and compassion for) lived experiences unlike any we’ll ever know firsthand.

Here are some new books (mostly poetry, listed in no particular order) from the past year that have helped me wander and wonder from one day into the next:

Frank Bidart – Half-Light

Anaïs Duplan – Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus

Marwa Helal – I Am Made to Leave I Am Made to Return

Traci Brimhall – Saudade

Layli Long Soldier – Whereas

Rachel McKibbens – blud

Sahar Muradi – [Gates]

Steph Burt – Advice from the Lights

Maggie Smith – Good Bones

Cait Weiss Orcutt – Valleyspeak

Nuar Alsadir – Fourth Person Singular

Nicole Tong – How to Prove a Theory