BOA Blog

Newpages is calling Michael Teig's second poetry collection, There's a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick, "a romping book, full of syntactic (and synaptic) leaps." According to the recent review, Teig's news poems "hint at a diverse poetic lineage, possibly including James Tate, the New York School poets, and Sombrero Fallout-era Richard Brautigan." For poems that jump from "chickens" to "waltzes" to "hats," reviewer Elizabeth O'Brien calls the collection "confusing and exhilarating ... disorienting and enjoyable, and somehow utterly right." "...the poems in There’s a Box in the Garage You Can Beat with a Stick are...

According to a recent The Rumpus review, Zeeshan Sahil's Pakistani translation, Light and Heavy Things, is a "thematically coherent, well-composed–albeit brief–collection that places Sahil right up there with the best of contemporary Pakistani poets, alongside folks like Hasina Gul, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Yasmeen Hameed." Commenting on the book's title, the review says, "... it's true that Sahil frequently juxtaposes the mundane and atrocious, the lighthearted and heartbreaking. Over the course of his unfortunately short life, Sahil witnessed multiple military coups marked by continuous, often violent political unrest. But the titular 'heavy' and 'light' refer as much to his home country's...

When it comes to The Stick Soldiers, reviewer Leilani Squire of Bookscover2cover cannot commend author Hugh Martin enough. "[The Stick Soldiers] is a brave, honest and authentic journey of a young man who served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker and was deployed to Iraq in 2004. This collection of poems is not light reading but it is necessary reading if we are to heal the wounds of war and shorten the divide in our country. This is not about politics, but about poetry." Martin takes his readers to a place they've never been before,...

Aurelie Sheehan's Jewelry Box (BOA, Fall 2013) was recently featured by Tucson Weekly. The new collection alludes to Sheehan's own personal life experiences in brief, thoughtful stories. "Not quite prose poems, not quite flash fiction, not quite memoir--nonetheless all of the above--the little pieces in Aurelie Sheehan's new collection that she calls 'histories' do, in fact, hint at her life history," says the review. "Her entries--some as short as a single paragraph; none longer than a few pages--explore feminine sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood, and the writer's life related to feminine sexuality, motherhood, daughterhood." "These 'histories' can shimmer exquisitely jewel-like." Sheehan was...

Geffrey Davis is winner of the 2013 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review for his poem “What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse.” The poem comes from his forthcoming collection Revising the Storm (BOA, April 2014). This debut collection by a Cave Canem fellow burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored—tender, comic, wry, tragic—interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their “embarrassed desires” for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the ’80s...