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National Poetry Series

Found in Poetry
Established in 1978, the National Poetry Series is a literary awards program which sponsors the publication of five books of poetry each year. The manuscripts, solicited through an annual Open Competition, are selected by poets of national stature and published by a distinguished group of trade, university, and small presses.
Field Guide for Accidents by Albert Abonado
Available on (10-22-24)

Field Guide for Accidents

Book 9
Paperback $18

National Poetry Series : Titles in Order

Book 9
SELECTED BY MAHOGANY L. BROWNE FOR THE NATIONAL POETRY SERIES

“you showed him your teeth, you dared him to look into your mouth to see the metal bands straightening your jaw into an American smile.”—from Field Guide for Accidents

An excerpt from Mahogany L. Browne’s statement announcing the 2024 National Poetry Series winner:

Field Guide for Accidents begins with a prayer and carries us through nature among the wings of birdsong and a mother’s healing psalms. Each poem betwixt breath and faith. Faith in God and faith in the loss of one’s identity. The line breaks and the lemons illuminated. The insistence of a family silence and the temptation to follow the sound of one’s internal weeping, all a joyous unearthing.

The text, both scientific in fact and devout in humanity, wields the power to expose the flesh of how death, god, and blueberries all have a song of their own. The author writes with a deft hand towards the knowing and the inarticulation of feeling; the practice of balance and bodies off-axis; oscillating between memory and rememory. This collection is a declaration. Small wolves, horses, trees, honeybees, rice, blessings, and ground beef. The specificity of living coaxes its audience through each section as dutifully as a theater’s usher.

The delicate handiwork of archiving a family’s history without fear of dishonoring a bloodline. Each poem is a piece in the puzzle in the act of metamorphization or the humble art of praise or the study of ecopoetics or the undoing of our greatest worries.

In this collection couplets turn into family photo albums and odes reverberate like fine-tuned pianos. The author is playing us a song, one that anyone can sing along to if there is a pulse beneath your skin. The author explores the restrictive nature of respectability while writing about intimacy and rediscovers racism in the fraught hands of friends.

There isn’t one way into this collection without exposing your own wounds. So lean in, reader. Loosen the neck tie from your imagination’s curve and watch Abonado sculpt human from stone.
Book 8
“What gives us the right to listen to someone else’s body?”—Alisha Dietzman, from Sweet Movie

A National Poetry Series winner selected by Victoria Chang, Sweet Movie confronts romantic and religious masochism to interrogate spiritual, sexual, and moral agency

Sweet Movie’s love poems and ekphrasis echo splintered versions of the same question: how do we navigate a world where the expectations of our performance—our presentation, our means of existence—are dictated by the viewers themselves?

Mirroring the uncertain, unstable tenor of Dušan Makavejev’s controversial avant-garde film Sweet Movie (1974), the voices in Sweet Movie are equal parts docile, feverish, and violent. This collection reimagines a feminist approach to religious masochism to explore the ways women are denied agency by both their faith communities and by outsiders.

Dietzman’s poems move through locations across Central Europe and the American South. Each new landscape informs the next: Memphis appears in Berlin in the form of a dead deer, and Southern syntax haunts an elegy for Gustavs Klucis.

The inspired poems from Sweet Movie use film and art to break open seeing. What results are deeply insightful and spacious poems of faith, displacement, and love. Perpetually observant, Sweet Movie guardedly but desperately consumes a world that has become unsettling and uncertain.
Book 7
A 4-part poetry collection that explores women’s roles in familial dynamics, immigration, and El Salvador’s civil war while reflecting on the death of the poet’s father

A National Poetry Series winner, selected by the celebrated poet Reginald Dwayne Betts

When COVID-19 broke and the United States closed the border to travel, Alexandra Lytton Regalado was separated from family back in El Salvador. She wrote Relinquenda entirely during lockdown as a meditation on cancer, the passing of her father, and the renewed significance of community.

The central part of the collection focuses on her father during his 6-year struggle with cancer and considers how his stoicism, alcoholism, and hermitage might serve as mirror and warning. In contrast, she dedicates other poems to what it means for daughters, mothers, and wives to care for another as reflected in her relationships with the men in her life.

Situated in the tropical landscapes of Miami, Florida and El Salvador, the poems also negotiate the meaning of home, reflecting on immigration and the ties between United States and El Salvador 30 years after her birth country’s decade-long civil war.

In a lyrical and often bilingual voice, Regalado explores the impermanence and the body, communication and inarticulation, and the need to let go in order to heal regrets.
Book 6
A National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Kwame Dawes.

A 5-part series of interwoven poems from a dying parent to her daughter, examining the human capacity for grief, culpability, and love, asking: do we as a species deserve to survive?

Dear Specimen opens with both its speaker and her planet in peril. In “Speak to Me,” she puzzles over a millipede, as if the blue rune of its body could help her understand her impending death and the crisis her species has created. Throughout the collection, poems addressed to specimens echo the speaker’s concern and amplify her wonderment. A catalog of our climate transgressions, Dear Specimen’s final poem foretells a future in which climate refugees overrun one of our planet’s last habitable places.

The collection’s lifeblood is a series of poems in which the speaker and her daughter express their concern for, and devotion to, one another. The daughter’s questions mirror the ones her mother asks of specimens: what are we meant to do with so much hazard and wonder? When the speaker hints at the climate crisis in a bedtime story she tells her grandson, we, too, feel the peril he may face.

Juxtaposing a profound sense of intimacy with the vastness of geological time, the collection offers a climate-conscious critique of the human species—our search for meaning and intimacy, our capacity for greed and destruction. Dear Specimen is an extended love letter and dire warning, not only to the daughter its speaker leaves behind but to all of us.
Book 5
An astonishing debut collection looking back on a community of Mexican American boys as they grapple with assimilation versus the impulse to create a world of their own.

Who do we belong to? This is the question Michael Torres ponders as he explores the roles that names, hometown, language, and others’ perceptions each play on our understanding of ourselves in An Incomplete List of Names. More than a boyhood ballad or a coming-of-age story, this collection illuminates the artist’s struggle to make sense of the disparate identities others have forced upon him.

His description of his childhood is both idyllic and nightmarish, sometimes veering between the two extremes, sometimes a surreal combination of both at once. He calls himself “the Pachuco’s grandson” or REMEK or Michael, depending on the context, and others follow his lead. He worries about losing his identification card, lest someone mistake his brown skin for evidence of a crime he never committed. He wonders what his students—imprisoned men who remind him of his high school friends and his own brother—make of him. He wonders how often his neighbors think about where he came from, if they ever do imagine where he came from.

When Torres returns to his hometown to find the layers of spray-painted evidence he and his boyhood friends left behind to prove their existence have been washed away by well-meaning municipal workers, he wonders how to collect a list of names that could match the eloquent truths those bubbled letters once secured.
Book 4
Snapshots of youth, displayed with verve and sparkling clarity, in a new collection of poems that “dazzles with its linguistic sleight of hand” (Richard Blanco).

From jaunts through New York subways, to a Cincinnati Waffle House, to a chance encounter with one’s future life partner, Sands writes in turns autobiographically and imaginatively, drawing on voices from his private world and the public sphere to create an urgent portrait of youth that is almost rebellious in its sheer, persistent joy. Nostalgic and vivid, this collection of poems is written reverie. Selected by Richard Blanco, Jon Sands is the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series.
Book 3
The reimagined story of Anarcha, an enslaved Black woman, subjected to medical experiments by Dr. Marion Sims. Selected by Tyehimba Jess as a National Poetry Series winner.

In this provocative collection by award-winning poet and artist Dominique Christina, the historical life of Anarcha is personally reenvisioned. Anarcha was an enslaved Black woman who endured experimentation and torture at the hands of Dr. Marion Sims, more commonly known as the father of modern gynecology. Christina enables Anarcha to tell her story without being relegated to the margins of history, as a footnote to Dr. Sims’s life. These poems are a reckoning, a resurrection, and a proper way to remember Anarcha . . . and grieve her.
Book 2
Searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss, from an American Book Award–winning author.  Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series.
 
El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States, while across the river, Ciudad Juárez suffers a history of femicides and a horrific drug war. Witnessing this, a Filipina’s life unravels as she tries to love an addict, the murders growing just a city—but the breadth of a country—away. This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines. These poems thirst in the desert, want for water, searching the brutal and tender territories between bodies, families, and nations.
Book 1
National Poetry Series Winner

A collection of poems exploring religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia—with a foreword by Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences.
 
In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author’s East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal: poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.

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