BOA Blog

[caption id="attachment_2162" align="alignleft" width="200"] Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths[/caption] A night of poetry and music to celebrate the life of the late poet Lucille Clifton, and the recent publication of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, is set for Thursday, February 21, at CUNY’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City. Admission is free and open to the public. The celebration, to begin at 7:00PM, will include an introduction by co-editors of Clifton’s Collected Poems, Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser, followed by poetry readings from 13 world-class poets: Sherman Alexie, Tina Chang, Toi Derricotte, Michael Dickman, Timothy Donnelly, Cornelius Eady, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn,...

At it again, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 is on Ms. Magazine's list of 2012's Best Books of Poetry by Women! "Just two years after her death, this 769-page collection is a welcome anthology, representative of more than 40 years of Clifton’s writing. If you’re not yet familiar with Clifton’s incredible mix of the familial and the political, this is one book you need right now." See Ms. Magazine's full list, here. Don't have your copy of The Collected Poems of  Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, yet? Get it here.

Double Room Journal is calling Marosa di Giorgio a poet with a “quiet, lyrical voice” in her new 2012 collection Diadem: Selected Poems, with English translations from the Spanish by Adam Giannelli. According to the review, the collection is full of “earthy celebrations of pastoral Uruguay and semi-surreal moments of magical realism” within a “bucolic landscape that evokes both the nostalgic innocence of childhood and the disturbing thresholds of sexual awareness.” di Giorgio's poems, compared with the works of Kafka, Pizarnik, and Cortázar, “possess the sort of allegorical dimensions one finds in myth and fable.” Purchase a copy of Diadem,...

Congratulations to Barton Sutter for being featured in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry! Sutter's "A Little Shiver" from The Reindeer Camps (BOA, 2012) is an ideal selection for the winter season, and according to Kooser, a poet like Barton Sutter "knows all about cold and snow." A Little Shiver After the news, the forecaster crowed With excitement about his bad tidings: Eighteen inches of snow! Take cover! A little shiver ran through the community. Children abandoned their homework. Who cared about the hypotenuse now? The snowplow driver laid out his long johns. The old couple, who'd...

If you were to wonder what contemporary Polish poetry is like today, Gently Read Literature would hand you The Folding Star and Other Poems (BOA, 2012), with Polish poems by Jacek Gutorow and their English tranlsations by Piotr Florczyk. "From Marcin Bielski and Jan Kochanowski to the Polish poets of today," says a review by Gently Read Literature, "the ability of poetry to deal with nearly any topic and to especially tell little stories encapsulated in a few lines has long been a tradition of the Poles and an area of literature where they've displayed exceptional expertise. Gutorow has placed...