BOA Blog

Jim Daniels' new collection Birth Marks receives even more praise, in a piece by Coal Hill Review, the online imprint of Autumn House Press. Regarding Daniels' writing of such urban landscapes as Detroit and Pittsburgh, reviewer Mike Walker is impressed with the poet's ability to set his own stage: "It would not, I need to stress, be a 'scene' if Daniels didn’t take it there, but he does and much to his credit: there are numerous ways of writing about places like Detroit—a city begging to have as much written of it as possible—and Daniels picked this trajectory that takes...

BOA poet Adrie Kusserow (Refuge, 2013) will join a team of American writers on a reading tour to Sudan this October, as part of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Each year, in partnership with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, the International Writing Program "organizes reading tours to a country/region with a relatively sparse history of literary liaisons with the contemporary United States." Through public readings and cultural excursions on the tours, important and well-established American writers are connected to "new and distinct literary-cultural landscapes," while international colleagues and students are...

"Properly Speaking, Marosa di Giorgio's poetry was never 'lost' in English, because it never made it into English in the first place. Two recent collections in translation remedy this oversight, which in retrospect seems remarkable. We didn't know we'd missed her," says G.C. Waldrep of The Kenyon Review.  One of these editions, Diadem: Selected Poems (BOA, 2012), translated from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli, is a "more generous selection from across di Giorgio's oeuvre," according to the review. "At their most basic, di Giorgio’s lyrics are vignettes drawn from childhood and burnished with a parabolic mysticism that aligns them with...

Lauren Hilger of Green Mountains Review compares Adrie Kusserow's Refuge (BOA, 2013) to the works of Langston Hughes and Anne Sexton. Poems like Kusserow's "'War Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl' ...suggest the cadence and construct of Langston Hughes' 'Harlem,'" while poems like "Skull Trees, South Sudan" are "delivered with Anne Sexton tartness." "Kusserow presents her awareness and self-consciousness to the reader. She often writes the familiar as alien ... This collection grips the reader with jaggedness, inequality, horror, and the tenderness of nursing one's children. A Vermont mother watches her son and daughter play in the stream having seen a Sudanese woman...

Voices de la Luna calls Jim Daniels a "true master" of his art; and his latest poetry collection Birth Marks (BOA, 2013) displays just that. "Reading Jim Daniels' poems... reminds us that we are facing a muse, a working class poet who speaks from the alleys of Detroit or the narrow country road when he crosses the country with his bike ... I'm mesmerized by the poems in his latest collection, Birth Marks. When it comes to rendering serious poetry, Daniels is a true master who can produce remarkable passages...The poems are from the city streets, from Detroit, and are...