BOA Blog

According to a new Rain Taxi review of Douglas Watson's The Era of Not Quite, "Watson’s fabulist fictions make us laugh at ourselves, our incomplete longings, and irrational fears ... With a wicked humor and a sense of the absurd somewhere between Beckett and George Saunders, Watson makes us laugh while pointing out the irrationality of our desires." Winner of the inaugural BOA Short Fiction Prize, The Era of Not Quite explores the realm of futility in life. While depicting individual characters' struggles, these stories simultaneously zoom the perspective out to larger realities. According to reviewer Peter Grandbois, "The shift...

The results are in! Devin Becker is the winner of the thirteenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize for his collection Shame | Shame. The collection was selected from nearly 500 manuscript submissions by renowned poet David St. John. Devin Becker will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in spring 2015. Of the collection, David St. John says, “Devin Becker’s Shame | Shame is a brilliant debut collection. Here, the prose poem has been re-imagined as a cinematic vignette, yet rooted as deeply in the American Northwest as anything in Richard Hugo and David Lynch....

"A love of life mixed with a keen sense of its brevity, a scintillating appreciation that simultaneously sees the skull grinning at the banquet, the fly crawling among the perfect flowers." These are words used by World Literature Today to describe Fleda Brown's new collection No Need of Sympathy. According to reviewer Fred Dings, "Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to...

Poet Jim Daniels can't get enough praise, as his new book Birth Marks-- which travels from one urban landscape to the next--receives yet another noteworthy review. According to Poets @ Work reviewer Liv Lansdale, "Jim Daniels’s Birth Marks is a deeply enjoyable read. Reading it, I remembered why his is the type of poetry my favorite poets try to emulate ... The poems feature characters with finely tuned emotions, and each are captured by unforgettable imagery, each rendered in a different galvanized voice." Daniels's honesty and boldness are what really set him apart from his fellow poets--he certainly knows how...

In a recent interview by Words Apart magazine, Jillian Weise, author of The Book of Goodbyes, talks in-depth about her experiences as a self-proclaimed "cyborg" poet. Known for her candid literary explorations of disability and sexuality, Weise uses her talents to advocate for writers with--though not defined by--disabilities. Here are some truly fascinating excerpts from the interview: Words Apart: Do you think contemporary poets, writers, novelists, playwrights, etc. have sincerely invested or fallen short in writing about disability issues? Should there be a greater literary focus on people with physical and/or mental disabilities? Jillian Weise: I'm not omniscient enough to...