Given the overwhelming response to our May 1 post, "Who Should Have Won? A Writer's Spectator Sport," (cricket...cricket) here's another chance to be the judge.
Which of the following books of poetry and fiction (all of them published in these first five months of 2009, some having appeared in Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin) do you think will win one of the big literary awards—Pulitzer, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards, etc.? (Note to the crowd of readers, clamoring to post comments, who notice a glaring omission: Feel free to make your voices heard).
Poetry
Portait and Dream: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) by Bill Berkson
Romanticism (Norton) by April Bernard
See Jack (University of Pittsburgh Press) by Russell Edson
Selected Poems (FSG) by Michael Hofmann
Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco) by Campbell McGrath
Chronic (Graywolf Press) by D. A. Powell
The Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press) by Alberto Ríos
Poems 1959-2009 (FSG) by Frederick Seidel
The Great Wave (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Ron Slate
Assorted Poems (FSG) by Susan Wheeler
Fiction
The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Stacey D'Erasmo
Out of My Skin (FSG) by John Haskell
Nobody Move (FSG) by Denis Johnson
Castle (Graywolf Press) by J. Robert Lennon
How It Ended (Knopf) by Jay McInerney
Pygmy (Doubleday) by Chuck Palahniuk
Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead Books) by Nami Mun
Ruins (Akashic Books) by Achy Obejas
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (FSG) by Wells Tower
Sag Harbor (Doubleday) by Colson Whitehead
To find out of you're right, we'll have to wait a while—the National Book Awards will likely be announced in November; the National Book Critics Circle Awards, next March; and the Pulitzers and the Tufts Awards, next April—but just think of how shrewd you'll feel if you predict correctly.