BOA Blog

Fleda Brown's new collection No Need of Sympathy is honored as a "February Exemplar" by the Washington Independent Review of Books. In her monthly column “Exemplars: Poetry Reviews,” reviewer Grace Cavalieri calls Brown's work a "'classic technique,' hiding shadows and pockets of tiny universes within each poem." According to Cavalieri, a longtime a fan of Brown's poetry, "If you take a lid off, you'll get history, popular culture, society, childhood--and all as if she's just learning something new about herself by the writing. This is her poetic capital--a cultivated writer with the gift of intricacy/enrichment imbedded in a poem so...

According to American Microreviews and Interviews, Keetje Kuipers' first collection Beautiful in the Mouth "is a body of work bursting with 'much goodness' and many truths, some hard to read, yet impossible to forget." "Uncommon imagery prevails in this collection," says reviewer Dana D. Livermore. "However, what struck me most is the amount of angst and passion Kuipers can pack into a single phrase or line, which often lands like a sucker punch to the stomach; you feel it in your gut." Noted in the review is the distinct sense of embodiment in Kuipers' poetry. "...my body reacts to Kuipers’ poetry...

(W.D. Snodgrass, photo courtesy of The New York Times) The New York Times remembered the late W.D. Snodgrass recently with a special piece entitled "Knocking Once Again on the Poet's Door." Snodgrass, the author of numerous BOA collections including Each in His Season (1993), The Fuehrer Bunker (1995),  After-Images (1999), and Not For Specialists (2006), among others, passed away in 2008. In the piece, journalist William McDonald recalls both his first and last interviews with the late poet. "William DeWitt Snodgrass spent a half-century or more writing poetry, most of it vigorous and plain-spoken. In the 1960s, the poet and critic...

Fleda Brown weaves themes of science, family, and memory into a meaningful collection in her new book No Need of Sympathy.  In a recent issue of The Broadkill Review, Linda Blaskey writes, "This slender volume feels like a coffee table art book. It has that kind of weight. It's images rise from each page gradually..." Blaskey pays particular attention to "The Grandmother Sonnets," a section in the book, and Brown's use of "the grandmother" instead of "I" when referring to herself. "She is telling us, of course, that, although she is part of the children's lives, she is not at...

Aurelie Sheehan's new collection Jewelry Box received an honorable mention from The Story Prize Blog, and was called an "outstanding 2013 short story collection." TSP received 96 short story collections in 2013, and according to the prize blog, Jewelry Box was one that "particularly stood out." The 58 short works in Sheehan's collection (some only a paragraph, others a few pages) straddle memoir and fiction, exploring the nuances of sexuality, motherhood, love, and ambition. Like Lydia Davis, Sheehan’s stories are potent miniatures that blossom out from seemingly insignificant encounters and objects. Jewelry Box is a collection of intimate renderings of...