BOA Blog

In a new Entropy review, poet Anthony Seidman calls Dariusz Sosnicki's The World Shared an "excellent translation into English from the Polish," which is “marked by the tone of the ‘public poet’ … able to speak of social concerns, of communities, [of] epochs." "Sosnicki has loads of talent, and this volume offers North American readers entry into his necessary poetry." The epoch The World Shared introduces readers to is “lurching in the muck of crass consumerism, Google instead of the library, subpar hip-hop, and a ‘disastrous geopolitical situation.’” While the world Sosnicki captures is called “Audenesque,” these poems are concerned with incidents of...

In an interview by Lookout for its "House Guest" series, fiction author Douglas Watson (The Era of Not Quite, 2013) talks about his brief relationship with philosophy, and explains how fiction may be working for him as its substitute. "I don’t know that much about philosophy," says Watson, "but that doesn’t stop me from poking fun at philosophers in my fiction. Really, though, it’s my younger self I’m making fun of." Watson, who fell out of love with philosophy in Philosophy 101, says: “Philosophy, it turned out, was difficult and rather dry and quite possibly beside the point.” An urgent...

A new Publishers Weekly *starred* review is calling Robert Thomas' Bridge a series of “linguistic tours de force,” full of “crisp, concise, emotionally explosive riffs ... that together form an unsettling character study." "You’d pass her on the street and never notice Alice, who works in the word-processing department of a San Francisco law firm by day, and attends the opera, watches movies, or, home alone, listens to the voices in her head during off-hours. Alice leads her lonely life in what she calls the 'Goldilocks Zone': not too crazy, not too sane—a just-right (if tenuous) balance between calm and...

  For tickets, contact Melissa Hall at [email protected], or 585.546.3410, ext. 11.

In a recent Publishers Weekly *starred* review, Erika Meitner’s newest book of poetry Copia is called “a collection that bursts with American abundance while simultaneously describing its decline." Featuring poems inspired by the exploration and crumbling cityscapes of Detroit, Copia is an appreciable collection precisely because “[Meitner] turns these scenes inward, transforming them into a reflection of her own body." They are rendered in “rich language” and with “an eye for the texture of common objects." "Meitner has a stake in personal exploration that brings intimacy and despair to these poems, which makes them more significant than the simple observations...