BOA Blog

A new review of The Folding Star and Other Poems by Jacek Gutorow featured in Stride Magazine, begins with an excerpt from a letter in which Gutorow reveals his concerns about poetry in translation: "There is something paradoxical about the effects created by poetry in translation. The poets who are deeply immersed in their native language, who are capable of articulating complex meanings connected with innumerable modulations of colloquial speech, and who manage to sound out the unique frequencies of their languages by experimenting with etymology or phraseology, are usually poorly served by translators whose technical abilities may be splendid...

Writer Josephine Carr of CarrTalks sits down with Wendy Mnookin for an inspirational interview. Radiating humor and wisdom, Ms. Mnookin shares her interests and fears, which inevitably become inspiration for her own writing. When asked if she would describe writing to be her calling or her career, Ms. Mnookin responds: "I feel that writing is my calling and teaching is my career. I write because I have to: that's how I attend to my world, how I understand and organize experience. I love my teaching, more so as I get older and feel I have more to share with my...

Neil Astley of Bloodaxe Blogs honors the late writer Louis Simpson not only for his craft, but also for his personal life which inspired it. Astley reflects deeply on Mr. Simpson's life, praising him infinitely for the identity struggles he endured during his lifetime. Born in Jamaica, Simpson felt himself to be an outsider as he moved to and navigated through the U.S. Astley describes Simpson's poems in The Owner of the House as being "informed by a melancholy clear-sightedness, a generous, wry sense of humour, and a determination to celebrate the true lives and capacities of ordinary people. If Chekhov...

Publishers Weekly has honored yet another of BOA's Fall 2012 titles with a *Starred* Review - this time, for Tony Leuzzi's Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words. "Poet and professor, Leuzzi brings questing intelligence and a practitioner’s empathy to this collection of interviews with 20 poets who are diverse in terms of aesthetic allegiance, generation, and practice." The review notes the breadth, not only of the number of prominent poets interviewed in the new book, but of the topics discussed and insights pulled from even the most unexpected of sources. "The range of topics proves that poetry...

An insightful interview with co-editor Michael S. Glaser ran in this past Sunday's Edition of The Baltimore Sun, Lucille Clifton's hometown newspaper. In the interview, Glaser goes into intimate detail about the process of filtering, selecting, editing, and compiling the many poems of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. "If you've ever heard Lucille talk," says Glaser, "you know that she could speak about the African-American experience and being part of an oppressed minority without making a white audience feel attacked. Instead, you'd come away feeling, 'Wow, we're all in this together and trying to make a better world.'...