BOA Blog

Image courtesy of The Times of Israel The Times of Israel recently published an article marking the lifetime accomplishments of Lod-based poet Erez Bitton. Bitton, who was born in Algeria, "has risen to the summit of the Israeli literary world," winning the 2014 Yehuda Amichai poetry prize and being presented with the Bialik Prize's lifetime achievement award this past December. Often considered the father of Mizrahi Isareli, a new and major tradition in the history of Hebrew poetry, Bitton's forthcoming collection, You Who Cross My Path (November 2015) dramatically expands the scope of biographical experience and cultural memory regarding Moroccan Jewish culture....

According to a Zone 3 review, Revising the Storm reaches "for something beyond the personal, through the personal" in an attempt to make sense of the past. "Occasionally, these poems break through their cohesive, straight-laced narratives into something I and many other readers will find much more interesting. Inside the effort to 'revise the storm,' speakers stumble upon the problems inherent in memory." Reviewer Robert Campbell calls Davis "first and foremost, a hypnotic, arresting storyteller. These are poems for the ear and for the heart." Revising the Storm is a collection of poems that wrestles with the problems we face when trying...

An Asymptote review is calling the poems in Nguyen Phan Que Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen “fine memorials” for the historical struggles faced by the Vietnamese people. "There is both the quality of the earth and the wind in her poetry, an embracing lushness." The poems in the new collection are translated from the Vietnamese by Que Mai and Bruce Weigl. "Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s poetry collection is firmly rooted in the Vietnamese tradition, though her poems—or, rather, full-blown songs—also travel to Bhutan, Bangladesh, and other locales. The Secret of Hoa Sen is a collection about the earth-born: family, feeding, sustenance,...

Still looking for the perfect last-minute holiday gift? We highly recommend Bridge by Robert Thomas. And we're not the only ones! The San Franciscio Chronicle just featured the new fiction collection in a thorough and spot-on review. Calling the book an "energetic, lyrical narration," the review discusses the "precarious mental state" of protagonist Alice. "Bridge ... may borrow a weapon, along with a taut style and a slender economy, from James M. Cain, but this is no crime story. Instead, and perhaps incongruously, it is a quiet, interior novel, a character study in which the prose plays a bigger role...

Lee Upton, author of the wildly successful The Tao of Humiliation, recently spoke with The Quivering Pen for one of its regular features, “My First Time,” in which writers “talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers.” With clarity and good humor, Upton shares with readers her hallucinations and realizations about being a writer. Here is a fun sneak-peek vignette from the interview: “At first I was so excited I could hardly speak,” says Upton of the first time she learned one of her books would be published. The publisher at University of Alabama Press spoke to her for...