BOA Blog

Lee Upton's The Tao of Humiliation has been named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2014! Called "masterful stories by a writer of great lyrical gifts" in a starred Kirkus review published earlier this year, "these 17 tales explore personal and familial relationships with both pathos and humor—and all are well worth reading." Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories examine the course of humiliation, introducing us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a...

We are thrilled to announce that Marsha de la O is the winner of BOA Editions' Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Antidote for Night! Antidote for Night will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2015, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award. Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt...

In honor of Veterans Day, we want to thank those who have bravely served our country with a poem from Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers (BOA, 2013). The War Was Good, Thank You —In the college cafeteria, a freshman girl asks, So, how was the war? 1. We live in small steel hooches shaped like boxcars. We fill bags with sand and sweat to pile beside us. Our rifles collect dust when we sleep. Our rifles collect dust when we fire them. 2. In Jalula, I stood in the turret, hands on the Fifty. I looked over mud walls and...

Erika Meitner’s Copia “uncovers richness of meaning in plain American language,” according to a recent review by Rain Taxi Review of Books. The review notes Meitner’s focus on how “common objects and signage become mediums for recovering history and personal memory” in the face of decaying landscapes that are both barren and overabundant, from the aisles of Walmart to the city of Detroit. Meitner is the guide through such "barren surfaces" as American suburbs and cities, and emphasizes that “'The truth is / even cities / are ephemeral.'” What becomes important in the face of decay is recovering the stories...

The Los Angeles Review is calling Geffrey Davis’ Revising the Storm “a compelling story through verse," capable of making readers “stop for far longer than punctuation warrants in order to fully appreciate a single couplet.” "Revising the Storm reverberates with the voice of a young man emerging from a boyhood plagued by hunger, loneliness, and pain into a new life as a man who finds peace in reconciling with the past. The cyclical passage of life, love, and responsibility from father to son is measured in its varying degrees." In these poems, readers come to see the development of the...