BOA Blog

The Missouri Review (online) has featured Douglas Watson's "Against Specificity," the first story in his new collection The Era of Not Quite, for National Short Story Month. Reviewer Kyle Minor says the story is "among the most extraordinary stories [he's] ever read." Watson is the winner of the inaugural BOA Short Fiction Prize and works for Time magazine. The story's opening line is remarkable, "a distillation of general Americanness... the bare bones set-up that fuels 90% of all American fiction." The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B. According to Minor, Watson flouts fiction-writing standards in...

BOA's 2012 translation of Jacek Gutorow's The Folding Star and Other Poems was featured in The West Coast Translation Review earlier this month. In "Jacek Gutorow and Contemporary Polish Poetry," reviewer Kaitlin Dyer contrasts Gutorow's work with that of previous Polish poets: "...while Gutorow may draw on the roots of Polish poetry, he also departs from the well known tradition." Dyer describes Gutorow's writing as "distinct and evocative," its diction "commanding." According to the review, this makes Gutorow an artist of particular interest for readers of Polish poetry, as it focuses more often on questions than resolutions. Gutorow is characterized as a poet with a well defined and authoritative voice, who...

"we listen to the eucalyptus scratch the violet sky" Hugh Martin reads his poem "Foot Patrol" during an on-air interview with Iowa Public Radio, as interviewer Charity Nebbe "explores art created by veterans in their post-military lives." The initial serenity of eucalyptus in the poem is juxtaposed with the violence that Martin experienced first-hand during the Iraq war. Martin admits in the interview that his interest in poetry prior to Iraq was not piqued until he took an undergraduate creative writing class. In the recent Spring 2013 Issue of The Iowa Review, Hugh Martin is featured as the winner of the...

With the 13th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize just around the corner, BOA is thrilled to announce that esteemed poet David St. John will judge this year's contest. David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant awards for poets, including fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both The Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The...

HTML Giant recently posted "25 points" about BOA's new Pakistani translation Light and Heavy Things, a collection of selected poems by Zeeshan Sahil, translated from the Urdu by Christpoher Kennedy, Faisal Siddiqui, and Mi Ditmar. The 25 points, listed almost as one's informal stream of consciousness through reading the book, provide background on Sahil's life, the time period in which he was writing, and the trends that his writing fits into. The points comment on particular poems, and on the poet himself. Here are some of our favorites: 2. Zeeshan Sahil was born in Hyderabad, Sindh, in the ‘60s. He...