BOA Blog

Michael Teig's latest poetry collection, There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick, has recently gotten the attention of American Microreviews and Interviews. “As a means of interrogation, a book of poems can pose one or several questions … some questions are meant to drift in the background, unanswered, while others storm to the forefront, demanding replies.” Michael Teig’s poems, according to AMRI reviewer Laurie Young, contain both. And, though attempting universal questions, and addressing themes as common and central as “the domestic, the environmental, and the animal,” his poems interrogate in a way that’s unique....

  With “long, loose conversational lines” and a speaker "less concerned with results and technical prowess than the process of speaking (and living) itself,” John Gallaher’s In a Landscape is something of an “extended monologue,” according to a new Publishers Weekly review. The book-length poem, which has received much positive attention from the poetry world, "chronicles the questions, profundities, and crises of midlife, marriage, and fatherhood.” PW says: "Childhood stories (from the time of Gallaher’s adoption and adolescence), provide a backbone for the poem, and round out a history of adversity, uncertainty, and ever-shifting identity." "Gallaher’s charm and wit, and...

The praises keep rolling in for The Tao of Humiliation! Lee Upton’s newest fiction collection, and winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, received a new Library Journal *starred* review. "This story collection by poet, novelist, and critic Upton takes its title from one of several winningly off-kilter stories set at a motivational rural retreat aimed toward breaking down the ego as a precursor to building it up." But it’s the pieces themselves, and their tellers, that are particularly notable. According to the review, the stories "proceed by indirection, with elements that cohere only after the fact and open up...

Earlier this month, Publishers Weekly named Copia a Book of the Week in its weekly list of PW Picks! This honor places Erika Meitner in such company as novelists Joseph O'Neill and Ian McEwan, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and documentarian Ken Burns, among other writers chosen for the list. Click here to see the entire list of PW Picks: Books of the Week. Click here to read the Publishers Weekly starred review of Copia. To order Copia, visit the BOA Bookstore.

In a new review of No Need of Sympathy by the poet Lynn Domina, Fleda Brown is praised as a  “skilled poet, [whose] skill is perhaps most evident in the fact that she wears it so lightly.” Throughout the review, Domina discusses how Brown manages to mesh the technical structure of formal poetry with her own conceits, and to work with a unique plasticity of metaphor while carrying an air of nonchalance. "All poems, I’m told, are love poems in one way or another," says Domina. "And the object of all love poems is really the language in which it’s...