BOA Blog

This week, BOA Publisher Peter Conners served as a judge for the regional Poetry Out Loud competition held at SUNY Brockport. The competition winners were Demetria Hale of The Harley School and Nichola Metzger of Brighton High School. They were awarded with BOA books and advanced to the state finals, to take place March 9 in Syracuse, New York. The Poetry Out Loud program encourages and enables the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. BOA gives three cheers for all of these brave and talented teens and applauds their love of poetry!

Politics and Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse recently selected Robert Thomas' Bridge as its "staff pick," calling it a book bound to keep "the reader on edge even beyond the last page." Bridge explores "'infinite what ifs'" through the eyes of protagonist Alice. According to the review, "If you’re not stunned by the language of this poet’s novel, you will be by the plot, a monologue of suspense and grief; or by the narrator, the painfully smart and self-aware Alice." Click here to see the full piece by Politics and Prose. Robert Thomas' Bridge is available at the BOA Bookstore.

A recent review from RALPH [The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities] explores the difference between "poets" and "Poets" while reflecting on Erika Meitner's ability to connect poetry to readers. According to the review, "poet poets write lines that end-stop, occasionally use rhyme and rhythm and symmetry and a weird wrong metaphor to convey their stuff. But it is stuff (and nonsense) and you know they Just Don't Have It." "You want stuff that talks the life out of you into you, the salt-mine we call life which ain't out there, it's in here. Where we've been all...

  A Connotation Press review lauds two Spring 2014 BOA titles, Revising the Storm by Geffrey Davis and The Keys to the Jail by Keetje Kuipers, for "speaking some kind of shared, or at least complementary, language," and being "engaged in a very real, if coincidental, dialogue." Reviewer Julia Bouwsma writes, "Both Davis and Kuipers excel at rendering the physical worlds in which their poems were born." A defining characteristic pervasive in both of the poets' worlds is the language of shame. The review explores this theme, which connects the works of Davis and Kuipers: "I find myself wanting to study...

Poetry Everywhere with Garrison Keillor, a project airing on PBS, is expanding the poetry landscape with videos of some of the world's most beloved poets reading some of the world's best poetry. Included among these select poets are Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucille Clifton, and Dorianne Laux, all reading from their BOA publications. Each and every video is a masterpiece, and getting these voices into the homes and lives of the nation is a more than worthy cause. Produced by WGBH and David Grubin Productions, in association with the Poetry Foundation, the scope of the Poetry Everywhere project is to "expose...