BOA Blog

Photo by Marco Wilkinson BOA poet and translator Kazim Ali adorns the front cover of The American Poetry Review's Sept/Oct issue, and is featured inside with five new poems and an extensive (and intimately personal) interview with Christopher Hennessy. "Here is a poet of non-narrative experimentation suddenly faced with speaking autobiographical truths; a young gay Muslim negotiating his personal, familial and religious view of homosexuality." Hennessy delves deep into Ali's personal feelings about writing, the specific role in prompting discussions about repressive language, and how Ali himself came out in his book Bright Felon. He cites "something seismic" that happened in Bright...

  Poets & Writers magazine has placed Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words (BOA, 2012) on its list of Best Books for Writers. Passwords Primeval sets aside the artificial boundaries of poetry “schools” and “movements” to cut to the art of the matter. Leuzzi’s astounding knowledge of poetry draws new insights from such luminaries as Billy Collins, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirshfield, Patricia Smith, and Martín Espada. These new interviews offer a candid look at craft, inspiration, and living as a poet; they provide insights into the poets and their poems, without compromising their mystery. This eclectic roster of...

Recently reviewed on Library Thing is Fleda Brown's newest poetry collection No Need of Sympathy (BOA, October 2013). Reviewer Tim Bazzett admits right away that No Need of Sympathy "...keeps me coming back to ponder these poems ... over and over again, and each time they seem to mean a little more." Brown's poetry "reads the way a dream feels ... There are so many wonderfully thoughtful - beautiful - pieces here: a collection of very personal sonnets to her grandchildren ... homages to old family photos ... remembering desperate, deceitful students ... There are close to fifty poems here, and...

"...somewhere between flash fiction and prose poems and memoirs..." Publishers Weekly can't quite ascribe a genre to Aurelie Sheehan's newest book, Jewelry Box: A Collection of Histories (BOA, October 2013), in this week's fiction reviews. Luckily that isn't essential to enjoying this "Collection of Histories," read as "small moments and objects that capture the essences of larger personal histories--lives made up of motherhood, writing, love friendships, and everything in between." The individual pieces within the book only take one sentence to summarize, but as a whole they function on a deeper, more literal level, actively depicting the process and pieces...

Jim Daniels' "American Cheese" is today's featured poem read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. Daniels' new and fourteenth poetry collection Birth Marks (BOA, September 2013) travels from Detroit to Ohio to Pittsburgh, from one post-industrial city to another, across jobs and generations. Daniels focuses on the urban landscape and its effects on its inhabitants as they struggle to establish community on streets hissing with distrust and random violence. Read the poem below, and click here to listen to it read. American Cheese At department parties, I eat cheeses my parents never heard of—gooey pale cheeses speaking garbled tongues....