Together, over 700 book reviewers chose the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are offered in five categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism. Also awarded each year are the Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which is given by the NBCC to one of its members.

2007

Elegy: Poems by Mary Jo Bang

Publisher Comments
Mary Jo Bang's fifth collection, Elegy, chronicles the year following the death of her son. By weaving the particulars of her own loss into a tapestry that also contains the elements common to all losses, Bang creates something far larger than a mere lament... (read more)

2006

Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore

Publisher Comments
Tom Thomson In Purgatory is a collection of poetry from the creator of "Tom Thomson," a literary character whom former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins claims to be "a verbal phantom, the result of the poet's word-spinning, but at the same time we lean forward to believe in him — our hero for the moment, a man of the hour..." (read more)

2005

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

Publisher Comments
Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart. (read more)

2004

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich

Publisher Comments
Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of public crisis upon individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account. (read more)

2003

Columbarium by Susan Stewart

Review
"Deeply disturbing poems of original and unforgettable craft." Maureen Seaton, Boston Review (read more)

2002

Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest by B. H. Fairchild

Review
"These poems are an ecstatic celebration of language — long, lavish lines sprawling across the page as the speaker's consciousness roams the Kansas countryside. Fairchild is a spinner of tales who writes unforgettably of loneliness and the tenderness of the Midwest." Chicago Tribune (read more)

2001

Saving Lives: Poems by Albert Goldbarth

Review
"For all of his madcap gusto and wise-ass shtick, Goldbarth's most engaging trait is his deep and abiding soulfulness, a generosity of spirit that elevates clowning into eloquent feeling and places brashness at the service of spacious passions." Poetry (read more)

2000

Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan

Review
"A startling first collection of poems — startling because of bone-crushing violence and poverty and startling also because of the beautiful and precise language the poet brings on these scenes, violent or not.... The genius of these poems is that they insist on seeking the human despite devastating circumstances. Even the most wrung-out individual must still have a soul." James Tate, from his judge�s citation, 1999 Walt Whitman Award (read more)

1999 Ordinary Words by Ruth Stone