BOA Blog

In a recent Late Night Library interview by Joanna Kenyon, author Lee Upton talks about her new short story collection, The Tao of Humiliation, as well as her use of humiliation as a shot at redemption, literary epiphany, the body, and why we take so many selfies. “It’s as if humiliation teaches us how to be human among other humans," says Lee, "—that is, humiliation can teach us a humbling awareness of our flaws. Our idealized self is crushed in a moment of humiliation—as if humiliation is a ‘way’ of sorts, a way toward or through experience, a kind of...

Erika Meitner’s new book Copia was chosen for the September Rumpus Poetry Book Club! In the essay that kicked off the month-long discussion for the virtual reading group, Camille Dungy responds to the question “Why I Chose Erika Meitner’s Copia for The Rumpus Poetry Book Club” with a barrage of ‘because’: “because this book is written with the attentive eye of an unrequited lover,” “because there is hope amidst the dissolution,” “because that’s how life looks sometimes,” and most notably, because “the poems in Copia are poems we need right now.” Why are they poems we need right now? According...

A recent Miramar review is calling Fleda Brown’s No Need of Sympathy “ambitious … the work of a mature and retrospective poet.” In No Need of Sympathy, Brown concerns herself with poetry’s current position in the cultural landscape. She rounds off the collection with a sequence of conventional, personal poems. If a poet can be said to have a thesis, Brown's would be in her collection’s second poem, "The Purpose of Poetry." According to reviewer Elizabeth Dodd, poetry is “perhaps in a bit of a mid-career crisis, surprised by the many challenges and changes time keeps working on us.” But...

Happy Halloween from BOA! Here's some spooky verse by Michael Waters, from his collection Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems, to get your spine tingling: Morpho In his Journey to the Jade Sea, "one of the world’s greatest walkers," John Hillaby, tells the story of the ebony child raped and strangled near an acacia tree in the bush in Kenya. The game warden who found her was mesmerized by two large, blue-green, rarely seen butterflies trembling upon her glazed, staring eyes, opening and closing their wings. Those butterflies were attracted to moisture, lapping with their spiked, black tongues the shallow lagoons of...

A new Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books essay by Christopher Kempf discusses the art of war poetry, looking to five "critically-regarded books of poetry by veterans" which have been "released by distinguished presses": Hugh Martin's The Stick Soldiers (BOA, 2013); Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise by Brian Turner; Bangalore by Kerry James Evans; and Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers. According to Kempf, we can better understand, "through poetry, 'the causes and the crimes'" of conflict." He adds, "the relationship between war and its poetic representation is also one of poetry's newest, most pressing problems, particularly...