BOA Blog

In a new Late Night Library interview by co-founder and director Paul Martone, poet Keetje Kuipers reveals extremely personal aspects of her new book, The Keys to the Jail: "I challenged myself constantly in the poems in this book to write to emotional places that actually shamed me ... I’m always trying to argue something in my poems. I’m never willing to give in to the complacent or passive, especially not when trying to translate some portion of my personal experience into poetry." The Keys to the Jail continues Elizabeth Bishop’s tradition of the art of losing, but delves deeper, asking the...

In the travel blog, "My Black Journey," National Railroad Passenger Corporation AMTRAK named Revising the Storm one of five "sizzling books you must slip into your travel bag this summer." Poet Geffrey Davis discusses his new A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize-winning book on the blog, as well as his favorite books, his start in writing, and his self-titled role as a "literary citizen." According to AMTRAK blogger Shydell James, Revising the Storm "gives voice to the realities of distance, time, space. This work challenges you to reevaluate your relationships to people, events and your personal version of stories as a way...

Image courtesy of www.grantland.com In his featured Grantland essay, BOA author Hugh Martin (The Stick Soldiers, 2013) recalls playing high school basketball with LeBron James, getting dunked on by his then-14-year-old Ohio league rival, and "how the NBA superstar helped get him through the Iraq War." In great detail, Martin recounts the shaping experience of getting dunked on by LeBron: "I ran beside him, waiting to swing my hand at his next bounce, but I struggled to keep pace, moving my feet as quickly as possible next to his long, rhythmic strides. After three dribbles he jumped off one leg and...

According to a rave Mantis review, Birth Marks is "the ideal of hipness," "the best of mixed tapes," and "cool ... Like the Detroit and Pittsburgh, baseball and Black Sabbath and road trips the book contains. Cool like Jim Daniels." The review notes Daniels' ability to combine humor with "the elegantly understated" in his fourteenth poetry collection, comparing the poet to the likes of Frank O'Hara and the Black Mountain poets. "Sitting down to read Birth Marks is a bit like drinking a high-protein smoothie made from O'Hara's breath, Creeley's observational skills, and Springsteen's wisdom; in short: it is Daniels...

Big news from the weekend for The Tao of Humiliation! The New York Times Book Review featured Lee Upton's new fiction collection on its Sunday Shortlist, calling the stories "long, erudite, warmhearted and capable, brimming with scholarship and knowledge." According to the review, "Readers will want to live inside this wonderful book — not just in its parties and wrecked gatherings and sophisticated conversations but in the sentences themselves, which are genuine shelters ... In its own way, each sentence is a container filled with something revelatory." Just released in May, The Tao of Humiliation is alternately chilling, funny, devastating,...