BOA Blog

According to a Patheos review, Erika Meitner’s new poetry collection Copia "traverses the nature of existence in a world that is both decaying and blossoming, in which the seemingly mundane provides passage to truth." In this collection about "urban and suburban life, consumption and excess, desire and disappointment, and perhaps mostly about loss and hope," reviewer Dan Wilkinson says "relationships, language, faith, buildings, objects and life itself are simultaneously transitory and expansive, diminishing and abundant. [Meitner's] poems gently explore these tensions, skillfully connecting the past with the present, and the concrete with the spiritual." Many of the collection's poems find...

There has been a wide circulation of holiday book recommendations along the literary landscape this season, and some excellent BOA books are on the lists of many. Check out what some are saying about new and recent titles from BOA. There's a book for everyone on your shopping list! Bridge by Robert Thomas In a recent piece published in The Herald of Everett, WA, the Everett Public Library staff have called Bridge a favorite book of 2014, and a "cream of the crop." The books on this list are noted for "their dexterous and creative way with words; their narrative idiosyncrasies,...

THANK YOU to all of you who shopped small with BOA Editions this holiday season! In doing so, you have helped support independent publishing and our mission of bringing essential, high quality literature to the public. To express our heartfelt thanks, we're offering FREE SHIPPING on any BOA Bookstore order through 12/15! Simply use promo code SHOPBOA at checkout, and select the free shipping option to save big on amazing books! Happy Holidays from all of us at BOA!

Publishers Weekly is calling Que Mai's The Secret of Hoa Sen "straightforward, personal poems" that “lament and celebrate with the landscape—the smells, colors, and people of her country—that is their touchstone." The collection focuses on “the lingering physical and psychological effects of the Vietnam war,” but also turns its attention to the larger world, singing for "the alienated orphans of the Vietnam War; for garment workers in Bangladesh; for the victims of Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines; and for mothers across the globe in perilous circumstances." Even with such a scope of subjects, Que Mai writes with a "detail-oriented eye" that...

Erika Meitner’s poem "Porto, Portare, Portavi, Portatus" was recently featured in Poetry Society of America's column "In Their Own Words." Poems featured here are provided in full, with an ensuing commentary by the author. This poem is the last in Meitner’s newest collection Copia, and contains many of the elements that are featured throughout the collection as a whole: optimistic mid-century Detroit; vacant buildings as a symbolic understudy for bodies; and a peculiar feeling of longing, expressed through places waning in both health and atmosphere. Meitner gets personal about the poem and what inspired it, including the Latin verb porto from...