The 14 Best Books I Read This Year

By Grace Cavalieri

Best Book of Poems

Medic Against Bomb: A Doctor’s Poetry of War, by Frederick Foote. Grayson Books. 78 pages.

Best New Novel

Alena by Rachel Pastan. Riverhead (Penguin) Books. 308 pages.

Best Chapbook

Congregation: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. William Meredith Foundation/Dryad Press. 17 pages.

Best Mixed Media (watercolor/poetry)

The Girls In The Chartreuse Jackets by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Cat in the Sun Books. 71 pages.

Best Adaptation

Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad by Alice Oswald. Afterword by Eavan Boland. W.W. Norton & Co. Paperback. 90 pages.

Best Nonfiction

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherill Tippins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 501 pages.

Best Book on “teaching poetry”

Singing School by Robert Pinsky. W.W.Norton & Co. 196 pages.

Best Anthology

Poetry of The First World War: An Anthology, edited by Tim Kendall, Oxford University Press.(UK) 232 pages.

Best Posthumous Book of Poems

SAUDADES by Jose’ “Joe” Gouveia. Introduction by Martin Espada. Casa Mariposa Press. 40 pages.

Best Reissue

Skin, Inc. Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis. Graywolf Press. 175 pages.

Best Book of Poems with Photography

If The Tabloids Are True What Are You by Matthea Harvey. Graywolf Press. 152 pages.

Best Translation

Guantanamo by Frank Smith, translated from French by Vanessa Place. Les Figues. 155 pages.

Best Essays

Twenty Poems That Could Save America: and other essays, by Tony Hoagland. Graywolf. 218 pages.

Best Biography

E.E. Cummings, A Life by Susan Cheever. Pantheon Books/ Random House. 240 pages.

Grace Cavalieri founded and still produces “The Poet and the Poem” on public radio, for national distribution from The Library of Congress, celebrating 38 years on-air, in 2015. She is the monthly poetry columnist/reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her new books of poems are, The Mandate of Heaven (Bordighera Press, 2014,) and, The Man Who Got Away (newacademia/scarith, 2014.)
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/media/poetpoem.html